


under the singing moon

by rappaccini



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Actually Not Incest In Any Shape Or Form This Time (huh!), Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Character Study, F/M, hear that? it's the sound of me hacking away at 'beauty and the beast' on the harmonica
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 33,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24673168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini
Summary: When her husband and child are abducted by a pack of monsters, Allison Hargreeves offers herself in their place. She gets a lot more than she bargained for.(Or, the alluther Beauty and the Beast AU that absolutely no one asked for.)
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves & The Hargreeves, Allison Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Claire & Allison Hargreeves
Comments: 10
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

Far beyond the reaches of the city sprawl, of newfound gaslit industrial modernity, of the green-and-gold patchwork of provincial farmland and the swelling emerald sea of the forest, the patchwork palace of the house of Hargreeves stands high and haughty and alone, crumbling at the edge of the world.

The palace, which has stood since time immemorial, has never been beautiful; perhaps, if it had a different master, it could have been, but it was not to be. It was not built to be beautiful; it was built to entrap. Tragedy, you see, had befallen the first of the Hargreeves clan, when his dear beloved wife had wasted away and perished in their marriage bed, and the first Hargreeves, a man storied and honored as the bravest of warriors, the most cunning of leaders and the most powerful of sorcerers, found himself truly powerless for the first time in his life as an illness he had no name for swept in like the night wind and carried away all in his village, save himself and his wife. And then, at last, she had gone as well, carrying his heart with her. 

So frightened was he, of watching her soul slip away before he could divine the secrets of necromancy, still unknown to him, that he devised a horrid plan to keep her with him. The sorcerer, whose name is lost to time, drew from his deep coffers and sent for the hundred brightest building minds from all corners of the known world, housing and hosting them as they set to work building a labyrinth around his modest cottage from a patchwork of a hundred architectural styles, all to keep her soul by his side.

The palace had been built in the pursuit of love, and the first of the Hargreeves poured his all into it; with his grief he poured the foundation, with his anger he raised the walls, with his hubris he drew the windows, and with his fear he locked the doors. All of it had been designed to be larger than life, inflated with ego, to make all who entered it feel small. He’d sent hunting parties after the greatest animals in the world, so he might stake their heads on the walls and take their power for his own. He sent collectors to seek only the finest of art to adorn the halls, walls and floors, so none might say he was not cultured. He reached to the mountains bordering the edge of the world, and drew their shadows down over the valley, to shade and shelter his palace, so the light of his power would be the most radiant thing for many miles. He’d hired a dozen gardeners to grow the sprawling grounds of the fine palace, and imbued the rose vines with paranoia, so they might grow great and gnarled and bear petals dripping with poison, to discourage all from entry. The palace was _his,_ you see, and none would have it.

At last, when a thousand nights had passed, he had declared it complete, and sealed each and every one of his retinue of builders, architects, gardeners, cooks and collectors within the walls, so the manse’s secrets would remain his and his alone, and so their thousand ghosts might guard it for him, and light its lamps.

And in that great house, the law of its lord reigned supreme. 

For centuries it stood, untouched, as the lord Hargreeves remained unseen by all; some say his sons and grandsons and great-grandsons took up his place after he had passed, some that it is the same man, who discovered the secret to never-death, too late for his wife, but not for himself.

Regardless, the lord Hargreeves known as Reginald, first or fourth or fiftieth master of the palace, had found himself wanting for a family.

Perhaps he had at last made contact with his wife, or his ancestor’s wife, after centuries of divination, and found that she wanted a child. Perhaps he had been alone, with the fruits of his experimentation, a brilliant young monkey butler he had christened Pogo, for far too long, and was wanting for human company. Perhaps he truly was the latest in a long line of Hargreeves sons, and found himself infertile and unable or unwilling to marry, and felt the hand of death extending towards him, finding himself fearful of having a house with no one to give it to. Perhaps he intended to perform a deal with a devil so depraved that only the souls of infants were acceptable currency. 

It does not matter; only _this_ matters: the lord Reginald Hargreeves put out a call for forty-three foundlings, and was delivered five. 

Five bouncing baby boys were driven in five black carriages to the house, and he had taken them as his sons, decreeing they were all to be the exact same age to prevent the pesky business of primogeniture from dividing them, branding them with his name and his sigil and training them as he had been trained: for war. 

Perhaps he had tried to love them once, perhaps he never bothered; after all, he had sent them to battle at ten, when he had been so bored of them that he saw no other recourse but to toss them into a gauntlet and see who would emerge, and use what chaos they’d wreak to brighten his own name by selling it to the masses. 

It does not matter; _this_ matters: when the boys were thirteen, the lord Hargreeves, whether he was the original or the latest in a long line of identically cruel men, chose to take a wife. 

His first-or-second-wife had been young, young enough to be his daughter or granddaughter, and he had not chosen her: he had put out a decree to all the nearby villages, and she had come, the last in a long line of prospective wives the lord had seen. 

In the end, what had distinguished her from the rest, aside from her radiant and arresting beauty, was her story. The young lady, whose name had been Grace, and whose disposition had been sunny and kind and polished, had been raised by a family of great refinement, who had instilled in her excellent manners and the underestimated skill of running a household. She had been bred and reared to be perfect, and was, but for one flaw: she could not conceive her own children. So, upon hearing whisperings of the Hargreeves boys, she had taken it to heart that these, with his blessing of course, may be her own. 

Hearing her story, the lord Reginald, who had sought a wife specifically so someone else would perform the unbearable labor of loving his children for him, shrugged, said “Fine” and that had been that.

The lord, it is said, had practiced magic on his family, making his sons stronger and swifter and sharper and unbeatable in battle; in lieu of a traditional wedding night, he chose instead to enchant his new wife, to freeze her features in the springtime of her life so she might be forever young, forever beautiful, forever docile. He called it a gift, but those with discerning ears will distinguish that it had been to himself; because what could be more terrifying than a woman who grows old and ugly and disagreeable? 

Nonetheless, she had accepted it. She took it, and turned away from the dark corners of the house, and watched her sons reave and loved them anyway. 

The family Hargreeves lived together at the edge of the world, and now that the lord had something to show off, he sent for the greatest and most powerful men in the world, and when they came, as they were bound to come, he entertained them and sold to them his wares, and ordered his sons to perform for their amusement.

So it had been for seventeen years, years that would be referred to as golden by the guests; golden, for the thousand lights illuminating it, golden, for the mountains of wealth divined through alchemy, golden, for the shine in his forever-beautiful wife’s hair, and that of his favorite son, Luther, the crown jewel of his kingdom and the delight of all who beheld him, who saw him and beamed and decreed, completely sincerely, that he would be the grandest lord Hargreeves yet. 

Of course, it came to an end. Time had been slow in reaching the lord Hargreeves; he was quite cunning at outrunning it, but at last, after searching every corner of the world, it had come across his.

The end of it all had come knocking at his door one stormy spring night, when the parties had begun to dim in extravagance, and the house was empty of guests more often than not. All things fade as new fashions rise to replace them, and the things that had distinguished the lord Hargreeves were no longer unique or spectacular: the rich and the powerful now no longer needed to travel to the edge of the world to witness light burning forever in a glass, now, that they could craft their own and no longer needed to buy them from him; of far more import, the lord’s sons had grown into men, and were gnawing impatiently at their leashes, anxious to be set loose into the world, and no longer interested in dancing for table scraps.

The lord Reginald had retired early that night, cross with his sons for their failures and reluctant to acknowledge his involvement in them; in this house, his word was law, and on these grounds, his were the eyes of God, and that would be that.

Until came the sorceress, unnamed and more powerful than even he, who had heard of his might and his manse and his children and thought she would challenge it all, simply because she could. She had been called upon by a desperate mob of townsfolk, tired of the sons Hargreeves riding down to raze their homes and carry back souls to sell in shining jars to perpetuate their father’s glory. They were not men at all, so it was said, but monsters.

She had heeded it, not because she cared, but because she was a prophetess; she had no will of her own, was only the instrument of Fate, and content to do its work. Fate had decreed that it was time for the justice to come to the house of Hargreeves and so it would; far beyond her to challenge it. Fate is not bound by the laws of morality, but it does sway to them, once in a great while.

The sorceress, who was not human at all, but simply shaped like one, announced herself as what she was, and the sons Hargreeves, young men had so much life ahead of them and were starving to learn what it had in store for them, begged their father to allow her to enter.

The master of the house simply peered with his all-seeing eyes down at the sorceress, and, recognizing her for what she was, and what she represented, he shivered. He retreated from his children, up, up, up into a tower that was all his own, and there concocted a draught of poison that would stop his heart cold in mere minutes. Death had not come for him, so at long last he chose to let it in, and before he would, he begun casting the greatest of his spells, to ensure that his family would remain loyal always.

His sons, unaware of what he had been concocting, only allowed the sorceress inside, enamored by the promise of the future.

Now invited inside the palace, the sorceress stepped over the threshold knowing that the master of the house stood dying upstairs, and because it had been preordained that she would, she read off the villagers’ complaints, declaring their cruelty and monstrosity, and waited to see the sons’ responses.

Luther, the favorite, and therefore the new master of the house of Hargreeves in the moment to come, heard it all, and Luther, who had been raised on principles of justice and honor and loyalty and had clung to them in spite of the work he performed for the love of his father, helplessly perpetuated his lie. 

He and his brothers had been raised to do one thing, had bathed in blood so often that their nails were ringed with blood and it would not wash out. So many towns had burned, so many souls lost. He simply could not bear the waste of admitting it was for nothing at all. It would continue, he said, it _had_ to.

The young prince raised his greatsword. Each of his brothers, loyal soldiers that they were, followed suit, and snarled as he did. Their mother simply smiled, and told them she was proud of them. 

Far above them, the lord Reginald did not hear his son’s proclamation. It would not have mattered, if he had. Nothing would have been enough to prevent what he had begun.

With the darkest alchemies he knew, the lord Reginald set to work, and without a word, the power took hold of them, binding their bodies to the halls of the palace. They could _feel_ the curse, carving into their elongated bones, they _knew_ it as they knew their own names: They would never travel into the world of men again; for all their days, they would be bound to the grounds and lands owned by their father, and the setting sun would bind them to the palace itself, so they might be its eternal guardians. They would never know old age, nor illness, nor death, until it fell. 

He was binding them in magic, and, knowing as all cunning sorcerers do, that there is always a way to undo magic, he resolved to make it as impossible as possible can be.

The master of this wretched place, as Reginald was, had built it to capture love, and so the master of this wretched place, as Luther would soon be, was therefore bound to set love free, should he ever wish to see the house fall, and the chains binding all to it disintegrate.

The thought, of some stranger entering his palace and stealing the heart of his son away so reviled Reginald, that he knew at once it would be the very thing that he would have to prevent. So, with the last of his breaths, he gasped a curse, making his family as impossible to love as he, taking the worst contents of their secret hearts, and forcing them out for all to see. They would be beasts, for all of time, never to know human minds, human hearts, or human bodies again.

Six screams rattled the bones of the house that night, warping into five roars that joined the wind and was carried by it over the edge of the world; the people gathered at the twisted gates and listened until it was silent, watched as every last ghost-light flickered out, all at once. 

Inside the house, now drenched in the shadow their father had drawn over it, with nothing bright to beat the darkness back, lay five creatures, all hideous in their own way, writhing and whining in pain, feeling all the misery of instant transfiguration burning through their flesh, twisting them into shapes that were further and further from human.

Conversely, the lady of the house stiffened and shivered, and then felt nothing at all. Her skin turned to china, eyes to glass, teeth to pearls. She would be as beautiful and as delicate as her husband had always intended, and had been too incompetent to make reality. 

The smoke cleared; the brothers Hargreeves were now beasts, and their mother a doll. Their lone servant remained exactly as he was; the lord Reginald’s work on him had long been complete. 

The curse had not been spoken aloud; it did not need to be. All could feel it, echoing inside their skulls, etched into the undersides of their mangy pelts. They would never forget it.

The sorceress smiled down at the creatures, with a mouth full of far too many teeth. She had only needed to knock on their door, had not needed to lift a finger at all to bring about their end. 

With that, her work was complete. 

She left as suddenly as she came, flashing away in a blink of shadow, leaving the villagers at the gate to leave the palace on their own terms, once the shock of the palace going dark wore off.

The lights would never flicker on again. The palace of the house of Hargreeves would stand high and haughty and alone, sagging in on itself with the rot of time at the edge of the world, haunted by its creatures. It would remain that way for a very, very long time to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this'll be very weird and self-indulgent, but I spent a long time writing it so I may as well post it.


	2. Chapter 2

The years pass. How many exactly, whether it is three or thirty or three hundred, it does not matter.

_ This  _ matters: The world spins on without them. Memory fades, and history is rewritten. Generations come and go. The ruins of the towns they’d desecrated are eaten by the forest, and forgotten entirely, and those that still stand rebuild and forget why some houses are younger than others. The name Hargreeves disappears from ledgers and lectures, fades from fact to fairy tale, and once it at last becomes nothing more than a children’s story to the newest crop of young people to walk the earth, that generation yields our heroine. 

Allison is born in the last true city before the edge of the world. She is born in a flash, to a mother who does expect her at all, who cannot recall who could possibly be her father; her mother is the most beautiful woman in the city, and has a different lover each night, she cannot be expected to account for them all. The subject of her parentage is of great debate, and makes her a remarkable curiosity, especially when her mother marries the city’s third-wealthiest man, king of a railway company. 

Allison, though she is not truly royal, not in the old respected way, is raised as a princess, in a splendid mansion in the middle of the city, and has no memory of a time in which she had been fatherless, though her stepfather does not do the work of raising her, entrusting her instead to an army of eager nannies. 

She is alone for much of her childhood. Her parents, being the third-richest man and the most beautiful woman in their small city, are gone most nights at parties she is too young to understand the importance of. Her father is at work most days, and often absent for long stretches of time on business, while her mother has the servants under strict orders not to disturb her rest. She spends an hour with her parents each day, at the dinner table, where she speaks with them between courses, and because she knows no different, she thinks it good and fair. Allison contents herself instead with the power of being able to clap her hands and raise her voice, and have an army of nannies assemble to make her every wish come true.

When Allison is thirteen, this changes; her father returns from an unannounced trip to a small, backwater town in the dead of night, with a small, pale girl trailing behind him, holding a threadbare bundle of clothes in one arm, and with a violin under the other.

This, she is told, is his daughter as well, and overnight, Allison has a sister.

The story, which is told over and over again to Allison at dinner, and then in the conversation halls of the city, which Allison is finally old enough to begin attending, goes as follows: Her father had a passing affair with a young maid attending to his rooms while on business, and the girl, who had hardly so much as kissed a boy before meeting him, would soon become the talk of her small village when she, without so much as showing any indication of pregnancy, suddenly keeled over next to the town’s well at midday and yielded a daughter. 

Now, that maid is dead, and so the daughter, named Vanya, is now his responsibility. Hence, her sudden arrival in his house. 

Her mother accepts it without question. Vanya, they presume, is the same age as Allison, and therefore there had been no violation of their marriage bed, as there had not been a marriage bed at all at the time. If anything, they take it as proof that they are so well-suited to one another; she had a child out of wedlock, and now her husband has returned the favor.

Furthermore, they are also in agreement about the state of the girl: she is a dull, unattractive creature in comparison to her sister-who-is-not-her-sister, and must be sequestered, for the good of Allison's debut. 

While Vanya is kept within the house at all times, Allison is promenaded about town every night, the brightest star in the city sky. Every night, there is a party she must attend, and every day, she must spend hours powdering her face and curling her hair and trying on newer, prettier dresses in preparation for it. 

Despite this, there are still moments of quiet that slip loose, like quick, slithering animals, in which there is no one to sing for or dance with, no one to charm or placate, and in those moments, Allison finds her sister, and sits with her.

They look like an odd pair: a gorgeous young girl, sinking in the center of an enormous, candy-colored silken skirt with a crown of dark curls on her head, and a small, pale, grim-looking girl in her sister’s faded castoffs. And they  _ are  _ an odd pair: Allison has been conditioned to adore the spotlight, and Vanya to shy away from it, and both have been trained to resent the other. 

Their friendship, if it can be called that, is mercurial, one moment defined by long, uncomfortable silence that settles between them and clings to their skirts like a third, even more unwanted sister, and the next filled with giggles echoing down the mahogany halls and heists concocted to obtain the candies hidden away in the kitchen cupboards.

The one thing, apart from the parents they share, that they truly have in common is their music: Vanya had kept her mother’s violin, all those years, determined which of the rooms in her new home were the most soundproof, and has spend years pouring over the same notes from the single crumbling songbook she had brought with her from her mother’s village; and not only has Allison inherited the luminous beauty of her mother, she has developed a magic all her own: as a young girl, her honeyed voice had been discovered to be not only uniquely persuasive, but sonorous as well. When she speaks, all are bound to agree with her, to hand her what she asks for and to follow her every command. But when she sings, her voice is the likes of which one would have to travel far and wide to witness at the most splendid opera houses in the country, able to stop grown men in their tracks and leave them weeping.

The few times they are able to truly get along are always accompanied by music. Vanya’s high, shivering tones will swell with a sound that seemed altogether too big for her, too savage, too powerful and prone to spinning out of control. And Allison, bored and cross at the song for being unable to control itself, will set loose a run of a few notes, and weave them into her sister’s song like a golden ribbon, binding them together. It lasts only for a moment, as Allison soon remembers her sister’s flaws, rolls her eyes and sets to smoothing them out. 

Vanya hates it, she thinks; she’s always crying when the music stops.

“You’re so good,” she would say, “You’re  _ too  _ good at it,” and Allison would reply smugly, “Why, yes I am. Do keep up.”

The one time their parents hear them, they decide to put Allison up at the opera, where she is beheld by an audience of a thousand, who leap to their feet and cry for her to return again, and again, and _again,_ which she does. Vanya receives a pat on the head, and is told she ought not to play so loud. 

They keep making music together, perhaps because there is simply no one else to make it with, but they never do so in front of a person again. Allison keeps coming back, keeps chasing that one starry moment where everything between the two of them falls away and they float together. And Vanya, good sister that she is, keeps giving it to her. 

So Allison grows up gilded, and all the fine things in the world are presented to her: dresses of silk and velvet, a coterie of friends nearly as rich and beautiful as she (but not  _ as  _ much, which is very important), her mother’s beauty, her father’s wealth, her sister’s love, her city’s adoration, her beauty, her song… The one gift she has not received, by the age of seventeen, is death.

And then it arrives, in the form of a letter, presented to the sisters by a grim page, declaring to them that their parents have died quite suddenly in a tragic railway accident, on their way back from a trip to the seaside to attend to their father’s business.

Vanya thanks the page quietly, and, accustomed to loss, and to disappointment, and to not having things of her own, withdraws quietly into herself to draw the curtains and do the customary mourning. 

Allison, in contrast, has always been given things, has never known what it is like to  _ lose  _ something and not clap her hands together and have a replacement appear in front of her. She laughs, high and cold, when she hears the news, then tears the letter into shreds, pressing past her sister and throwing the heavy oak doors open, letting the cold wind in to carry her away to the ball she had been planning to attend that evening. "What do I care," she says, "The world loves me, and shall carry on loving me." 

She returns without her heart; it had popped out of her chest and bounced down the steps of her mansion as she’d left, and she had stuck her heel in it on her way down the street. 

While Vanya draws the curtains and covers the mirrors, and dismisses most of the staff so they might save what she realizes is now a finite source of income, Allison carries on as she had, now the only member to represent her family at all the important dinners and galas, now the brightest star at the theatre, now determined to not be alone with her grief for a moment, lest it come roaring up from where she’d buried it and claw her to pieces. 

Years pass, and seasons change, and the curtains stay drawn, and the sisters grow, more different by the day. 

Allison grows more and more beautiful, until her beauty seems to hover about her like a separate, living creature. She is the sun, golden and shining, and all smile when she rises, and all clamor to bask in her warmth when she holds court at pageants and concerts and plays. She sings at the greatest theatre in their small city, and all come to pay tribute. She drains her inheritance dry, and she is bright enough to hide that her father's coffers are emptying.

As for Vanya, though she  _ has  _ developed her own kind of beauty, it is a quieter one, overlooked in the shadow of her sister’s brilliance but nonetheless  _ there _ , waiting to be seen. Her sister is the sun, and so she is the moon, a dull gray satellite, drifting in and out of view, forever bound to reflect her sister’s shine. She finds her audience on street corners, playing for free, cherishing the few who will stop and listen to her, smiling reluctantly at those who recognize her as Allison’s sister.

The sisters seldom spend time together, each busy with her own life, but when they do cross paths, it is never to make music; those days are long behind them. They have grown more capricious with age, are at each other's throats as often as they ignore each others’ existence as often as they sit in the high open window of their mansion, their legs dangling out into the street, and talk quietly about what they’d done that day, passing a glass jar of candies back and forth, searching for a common thread between them that they never quite find. It never occurs to them to pluck at their collective unhappiness, their deep well of sadness and their common desperation for intimacy; they are young, and they are learning, just not fast enough.

The sisters are seen side-by-side occasionally, and it is often remarked that Allison’s true father must have been a vampire, that she had inherited his gifts, and was drawing the life from her sister. This is only a silly idea, spread by people with no true cares or concerns, who therefore must peer into the lives of others to find them. Allison has it all, for now; why bother taking more, from someone so pitiable?

_ Why bother: _ a question Allison asks herself each time the rumor slipped within earshot, that she knows the answer to instantly: to make her own light shine brighter, in the hopes that its brilliance will hide that she has not been happy once in her adult life.

Her brilliance is not enough, she decides, so she seeks a husband.

She finds him quickly; how could she  _ not, _ being the most beautiful woman in the city, and the third-richest heiress?

His name is Patrick, and he is handsome, but not as handsome as she. He is rich, but not of a prominent name, as she is , and he is vain, but not as vain as she; this is good, she believes, because if he were like her,  _ truly  _ like her, then she would have trouble dancing around him as she does. She plucks him like a rose from a line of potential suitors, tries him on to determine if she likes him, and is in truth still undecided when she falls pregnant, and the child decides for her. 

Vanya hates her for it, snarls at her the night before the wedding about how terrible, how _selfish_ a thing it is, to lead such a man on, and Allison simply stares. She cannot understand Vanya, why she would want a man she would be able to love; why, when you could  _ lose  _ him, and sink into despair? When you can have him, and hold him, and far more importantly, _mold_ him?

She marries him, in the wedding of the century, and feels nothing.

The house is crowded, all of a sudden, when the baby, who she names Claire, arrives. The dozens of showers and welcoming parties she hosts require much adjustment to her home's decor, and the unpleasant presence of her sister simply will not do; people will _talk,_ you see, and Allison, for all her golden voice brings her, is still beholden to all the others.

Her heart is still missing; after the birth, she had tried to go searching for it, only to find that it had been whisked away by street cleaners many years ago, so she determines that she must find another place to put her daughter while she holds court at the city’s finest parties. So, she chooses her sister’s room, a vicious and long-winded return to Vanya’s anger at the emptiness of her marriage. If _you hate my family so much, then you should thank me for parting you from it._

She sends Vanya to the servants’ quarters, and the cold space in her where her heart had been, where a new one has yet to grow, pulses in approval. There, her sister stays, and Allison feels nothing at all.


	3. Chapter 3

Time scrolls on, and Vanya, like the moon, changes, and Allison, like the sun, remains the same. 

They are twenty-nine now, and her sister has rough, calloused hands, from days of playing on streetsides, and soft wrinkles sketched into her face, as though someone had taken to it with a penknife. Her sister is quieter than she has ever been, and she is very aware of her age, of the looks she gets for being without a husband.

Allison hates her for it, for the looks she gets when conversation inevitably turns to the eccentricity of her mousy sister, to how  _ unfortunate  _ it must be to have her still shuffling about the house, like an unwanted pet her daughter had dragged home. 

It has been over thirteen years since her parents died, and the wound the loss had left in her has scarred over, but not healed. Inside, despite her best efforts, she is growing a new heart, sparked by the birth of her daughter and grown with every moment she spends with her, and the few pleasant ones she spends with Vanya. But it is small, and weak, and she keeps it so, by handing the girl off to nannies, decreeing that she always do as her mother says, by numbing herself with drinking and dancing; this way, when she loses it again, it won’t hurt at all.

This small part of her flinches when she hears the rumors swell and shift in the direction of her sister. See, Allison feels so many things towards her sister: annoyance, that she is still standing in her shadow, and that her mere presence forces her to share the spotlight, when it could be hers alone. Sadness, that she is careful to swallow and smother, at how they had once been close, at how she had once been able to say with complete honesty that she loved her, truly. And most confusingly, gratitude, that her sister is far too nervous to mingle with men the way she does, that she has failed to attract a single suitor and is doomed to spinsterhood; Vanya had never learned to juggle wolves as she did, and they would certainly eat her. She may want her sister gone, but she could never have her harmed.

This is what she thinks of the man that Vanya brings home one evening late in summer.

Allison is a vain creature, fully aware of the worst of herself and determined to hide herself from it. One way in which she does this is by finding the worst in others, so she might distract herself from her own defects with those of others. This is what she does now, staring at the man her sister has found, who she introduces as Leonard Peabody.

She listens to his dull voice prattle on about how he comes to the city to sell his wares every month from his home in the woods, and his woodworking-- “Oh, he has a trade, how  _ quaint,” _ Allison says, and does not hide the venom in her voice, and smiles rapaciously as the two of them flinch at the end of the table, at the way her sister clings to him and he allows it; she can tell, you see, because she does the same with her own husband, allowing him to touch her because people are watching, and they must see it, because then they will talk about it.

Allison, for all the complicated feelings she has towards Vanya, knows implicitly that her sister can do far better, that she  _ deserves  _ far better than to cling to the arm of a man who is indifferent at best that she is there.

She looks at him, at his pale, inoffensive face, at the way his eyes keep flitting around the room, scouring into the woodwork and the fine china and the golden forks and knives, and she peels back his mask and sees him for what he is.

Her sister has brought a wolf into their home, and she has just announced that she has fallen in love, and shall leave their city to marry him this evening. 

Allison feels a laugh bubbling up in her chest, and it leaves her as a howl.

“Call it off,” she says, and her husband chooses then to take their daughter to bed.

Vanya waits until the carved door to the dining hall closes, and her brother-in-law’s footsteps recede. Then she turns to her radiant sister, and for the first time in Allison’s life, she is told, “no.” 

Allison, who is not accustomed to losing things, simply stares, as her sister picks herself up, takes the arm of the man, and says coolly: “Thank you for your hospitality.”

Then, Vanya takes her few belongings in one arm, and her violin in her other, and leaves. Allison stands in the doorway, and watches. 

For the first time in a long while, she truly  _ looks  _ at Vanya and the smallest observations she has made in the previous weeks, the ones she had made and then promptly set away in the shadowy, seldom-traveled corners of her memory, come surging up. Allison suddenly knows why Vanya has been smiling more, why she has not come home at all some nights, why she has taken to wearing her hair loose and falling around her face like tears. 

A month passes, and Allison spends it staring down her long table at the seat where her sister once stared back at her. The withered little organ in her chest is bleeding, and drawing attention to herself, when she makes her rounds at the city’s galas and parties and masques, and listens to the rumors swirl around her like a cruel wind.

She endures it, and as a reward for her troubles, the letter finds her at last: an invitation, in Vanya’s trembling hand, to attend a small wedding at the home of her new husband. It takes Allison an hour of scouring over the maps in her father’s former study, before she finds the place, a small village tucked away an inch from the edge of the map, in the shadow of the mountains. 

_ Very well, _ she huffs. The wolf has stolen her sister, and carried her north to some small, nondescript village where no one of note lives, where he might eat her without interruption. 

So Allison bundles her perfect little family into the train wagon, and drags them north, after her wayward sister. She will put an end to this nonsense, and take her home. 

It takes a week on the train, which Allison endures with white knuckles and a drink every hour, and then two more in a miserable coach ride down a series of winding, narrow roads through a sea of trees stained with the fiery colors of autumn, but at last they arrive, three bright jewels in a dull, unremarkable provincial little town full of faces that go wide at the sight of her brilliance.

She attracts a crowd-- how could she not, weighed down in furs and with her hair piled high with pins-- employs her voice, and learns all she needs to: the town is small, and superstitious, full of people too afraid of monsters in the wood to venture too deeply into it.

Amused, she inquires about the monsters, and is told a silly story, about a palace hiding in the shadow of the mountain that looms over them like a stormcloud, about the beasts lurking there to guard its treasures. 

The palace, she is told, had once been bright as a beacon, lit with the glow of a thousand lights, and its masters, the Hargreeves, were the most magnificent lords the world had ever seen, who once hosted the greatest kings and emperors and sultans and merchants and chieftains within their walls, and used the lives of the surrounding townspeople to fuel their fetes.

Allison listens with rapt interest at the mention of the parties, and wonders aloud at what on earth would make them end.

This, she learns, is a detail lost to time; the last of the lords, Reginald, died, and with him went the glory days of his palace. His sons, they say, summoned creatures forth to protect what was left of their wealth from those who would take it, allowing their gardens to grow over and their palace to rot, where they grew old and died wandering its halls.

Now, they say, all that’s left are the beasts.

Allison listens, passively, and then squeezes her daughter, laughing shrilly at the silliness of it.

She asks for her sister, and is given her location, and thinks no more of the palace.

She finds Vanya in a snug little cabin at the edge of town, surrounded by high stacks of chopped wood, objects in the midst of carving, and hunting traps stacked high.  Allison stares at one in particular, a coil of slender silver wire that gleams eerily in the sunlight, and seems an odd fit next to sets of iron jaws, spikes and stakes.

She does not linger on that thought longer; Vanya has opened the door, and is crying out for her.

As it has been months since they have last seen one another, Vanya has forgotten the last words they have shared, and wrongly assumes that Allison’s presence indicates her approval of the match.  She invites her in with a smile, takes her into her arms eagerly, and Allison stares over her shoulder, at the man she will marry, who gives her a lukewarm smile.

Allison looks at him, at this man who is so like her, and watches him drop his gaze to the ropes of pearls wound tightly around her throat.  _ He will kill us all, _ she thinks, in a moment of sheer, selfish panic,  _ myself and my daughter and my husband and my sister, he will kill us, and he will take my inheritance and my home and my fine silks and pelts. That is why he has chosen my sister. He does not care for her at all; he sees only a path to me. _

She waits, and watches her sister and would-be brother-in-law puttering around their small home, watches Leonard indulge her when she reaches for him, and otherwise ignore her entirely. He does not pretend to care, not even in the presence of her family; why would he, now that he thinks he already has her?

Eventually, Leonard leaves, to continue his carving work, and Patrick takes Claire to look at the nearby lake. When Vanya takes her aside to observe a hideous antique wedding dress she will wear, a monstrosity of lace that had long faded from white to cream to yellowed, which she pretends-- quite poorly-- to be pleased with, Allison takes her golden, sonorous voice and turns it against her sister.

“You must call this off,” she says. Poison had not worked, those months ago when she had first met Leonard, and so this time she tries honey,  _ “Please,  _ Vanya. Come home with me. The house misses you.”

Vanya scoffs, an odd sound that Allison has never heard coming from her before. 

“Was it not you,” she says, “Who wanted me out of your house? Well, here it is; I am finally leaving. You’ve come all this way, now won’t you  _ please  _ be happy for me? I have something that’s my  _ own  _ now. Won’t you  _ please  _ let me have it?”

The fear of Leonard flutters out of her at her sister’s words, and she remembers the true reason she hates this match: Leonard does not love Vanya at all. 

“You deserve so much more,” Allison says, spreading her hands wide, “And this man you’ve chosen… Well, you see he’s just not  _ enough.” _

A shadow flickers over Vanya’s face, and she watches the openness in her blink out like a candle in the night.  _ She knows, _ Allison realizes,  _ she knows already. _

Vanya has chosen him, Allison realizes, because she is so lonely that she will take anything at all, even the imitation of love, over being alone with herself. 

For the first time, she finds, her sister is just like her. 

“Vanya,” Allison sighs, balling her fists into the fine skirt she had arrived in, “Why did you choose him? Because you love him, or because he was  _ there?” _

Vanya swallows, and the sound is the loudest thing she’s ever heard. All is quiet now; she cannot hear the birds outside the window, or her daughter playing outside.

“You should not make the same mistake I made,” Allison says, “Settling for a man you care so little for. I cannot stand the thought of you spending your life with Leonard and feeling nothing for him at all most days, and disdain on the rest. I cannot stand the thought of you having children with him that you never wanted, that you will hold as far from you as you can, because you are afraid that you do not have enough within you to love them as they should be loved.”

There is a rustle at the doorway, and the sisters tense.

Slowly, as if to avoid frightening their eavesdropper, Allison turns to regard him.

It is not Leonard, as she initially fears, but it is far worse: Her husband, carrying her daughter in his arms, staring at her with a look of twisted bewilderment, that sours into a sadness that claws deep at her. 

Something has broken between them, has been broken for a long time, and he has just realized it. 

She sits, transfixed, as he turns, and storms away.

After a long spell, Allison suddenly remembers her feet, and springs up after him, but she is not accustomed to running, only trotting at a quick pace, so she is only out of the house and down the lane before she sees the horse thundering off, kicking up a smothering cloud of dust in its wake.

Allison watches it go. 

She is not used to losing things, not used to having things taken from her. She does not know what to do, when it happens right in front of her, so she throws back her head and laughs contemptuously.

“He will be back by nightfall,” she says to her sister, wringing her hands behind her, before storming back into the house to turn up her nose at her dress some more.

Then, afternoon fades to the deep blue of dusk, and her husband does not return with her child. Allison eats in silence with her sister and her lupine brother-in-law, casting cold glares her way. 

_ You have disappeared two of us already, _ she thinks, eager to shove the weight of the blame onto his shoulders, and returning his gaze with a burning one.  _ You will not do the same to me. _

The sky goes black, and the chill of autumn rises from the earth to dig its needled teeth into her heels, and they still do not return.

Allison turns her sister and her future husband out of their bed, and takes it for herself, as is the right of guests, but she does not sleep at all. She simply stares at the rough wood of the ceiling, her limbs heavy with cold, and feels worry begin to rot at her mind.

Morning comes, and it is gray and tense as she, and they have still not returned.

With her sister by her side, she hurries into town, and unleashes her golden voice. Within an hour, she has pried her husband’s whereabouts and motivations from the townspeople, who regard her-- and more curiously, her sister-- with just as much chill as the air around them.

Her husband has left, it seems. He had gone in the night, in a rage, ignoring the urgings of the people to simply stay and leave in the morning, pressed out by a force they found so malignant that it must have been far more terrible than the creatures wandering their wood. 

Allison feels a hot knife of guilt carve into her at this, but ignores it, and presses on.

There is no train leading home to their city for some time--  _ oh, _ she thinks disdainfully,  _ had all gone off well, I would have still been trapped in this dull place for weeks--  _ so he has commandeered a carriage and opted to follow the road himself. 

The road, she knows from the ride in, is twisting and treacherous, and branches off in a dozen places like a strange tree. 

From what she is told, her husband had carried her child down one of those branches, mistakenly taking it for the one that would lead him to the train. He had carried her daughter towards the shadowed space at the foot of the mountains, where the sun at even its highest point, is never able to reach.

Allison stares up, at that dark smear on the horizon, and feels, eerily, that it is peering down upon her curiously, staring through her expensive furs and maroon velvet traveling dress, flaying back her skin to examine the scarred cavity where her heart is trying to grow. 

“What is up there?” she asks.

There is a pregnant pause.

It births an uncertain look from one villager to the next, before she finally yields an answer: “Why, nothing at all.”


	4. Chapter 4

For what small victory it is, and Allison shall count it, the wedding is called off, if temporarily.

Allison and her sister depart from her would-be brother-in-law’s home on horseback, so they might move swiftly down the path her husband’s carriage tracks are following. 

They ride from the village into the forest, from midday into late afternoon, into the shadow of the mountain. The canopy of dying leaves are so bright in color that it looks as though sunset has been captured by the branches of the trees, and if Allison were not tense, she would stop and admire them. But her family is in ruins, and she must reassemble it; what on earth would the people at the finest of the city salons  _ think  _ if she returned home husbandless or childless or sisterless?

They ride until Allison’s legs are sore and when the soreness fades to numbness, they come then to the carriage, seeing its dark roof easily through the red-stained trees.

Allison prepares to cry out, to turn her voice to her husband and convince him to stay, that she was merely lying to convince Vanya to leave her fiance, that she loves him so; she is practiced in this sort of lying, and has done it before, when Patrick becomes uneasy. She will do it again, and he will fall for her song of persuasion, and they will go home and all will be as it had been.

Then, they see the carriage, now no longer a dark blur in a shaded wood, is overturned, and the horses drawing it are missing.

Vanya cries out, and Allison nearly leaps off her horse while it’s still moving. 

The sisters rush to the carriage, crying out the names of Allison’s husband and daughter, but no one emerges. No one is inside the cabin, nor flung into the road; no one is here at  _ all, _ not Claire, nor Patrick, nor any other person, living or dead. 

_ That’s a good thing, isn’t it? _ Allison wonders,  _ There’s been an accident, and the both of them lived, and were well enough to cut the horses loose and ride back-- _

“Allison.” It’s Vanya, and Allison climbs out of the cabin, stares at what she is seeing: the door has been torn clean off, and is a dozen feet away in the overgrown road, like a shutter flung by a violent windstorm. 

“Could it have been robbers, then?”  _ Have they been kidnapped? When will the ransom come in?  _

“No,” Vanya has rounded to the front of the carriage; she and Allison had ridden up in the rear, and Allison had leapt into the carriage without so much as looking at the front.

She rounds it now, and sees what she has missed: deep gouges, carved into the space beneath the driver’s seat, and the bar where the harnesses would have tied to has been torn off entirely.

They are not the marks of swords or knives, nor of the carriage itself tearing after a nasty fall; Allison recognizes them immediately as claw marks.  _ Many  _ claw marks. 

Great animals, bears or lions or tigers or wolves, have taken her husband and her child. They have stalked them, and then swept in and carried them away.

“We should turn back,” urges her sister, “Head back to the village, assemble a search party and--”

Allison ignores her. She’s already making for her horse; her sister will follow in a moment, she is sure.

She does not have time to ride hours to Vanya’s village and back again. By then whatever had taken Patrick and Claire could have eaten them entirely. 

Allison scans the ground with a practiced eye; she has been hosted by various wealthy acquaintances at their country homes, and had often gone hunting. She had been there to spectate, but a lover of hers had loved to hunt foxes, and to hear himself talk even more than she, and so she had allowed him to explain to her the principle of tracking. 

She remembers this now, picking up on the scuffs in the dirt road, and in the undergrowth itself. Hoofprints, and the dragging slice of the traces snaking behind them; here is the path the horses have trod, sharply off into the forest. She will not be following this trail; along the side of the road, there are two sets of frantic footprints: one large, one tiny.

Allison follows her husband’s footsteps, even notes a moment where her daughter’s little prints vanish; he had lifted her into his arms, she is sure by how his footfalls deepen ever so slightly.

He had survived, and then ran, and then…

There, the tearing of the ground amid a storm of pawprints: the animals had been upon them. And the grooves in the earth among them: they had captured Patrick, likely Claire as well, and were dragging him off to some cavern to eat him.

There is not a single drop of blood on the ground, not even a scrap of clothing, so Allison puzzles at the thought that whatever had taken them would bother with it, but she holds tight to the hopes that the both of them are alive, and chooses to cling to that instead.

Vanya is beside her again, and Allison proclaims her conclusion, to which she nods in agreement. 

“But what took them?” Vanya inquires. “Can you tell what sort of animal these tracks belong to?”

Allison squints, even leaps down from horseback to get a better look, but it is to no avail. They are too small to be a bear’s, too large to be a wolverine’s, too narrow to be a great cat’s, too long-toed and sharp-clawed to be a wolf’s. She attributes her inexperience to the odd notion she gets that they look almost human-looking. 

“I cannot tell,” she says, climbing back on and urging her horse to a canter. “I was taught to follow an animal, not identify one. What I  _ can  _ tell is that there are many of them, a whole pack.” 

Vanya makes a little noise of worry, but does not insist they turn back. All the better; Allison will not return empty-handed. 

Soon enough, as they ascend the mountainside, the road runs ragged, then practically stops altogether, as it has grown over so completely with grass and thick walls of bramble that it is clear that no one has ridden here in decades, if not even longer. 

Allison and Vanya grimace, forcing their horses through the underbrush, and thorny tendrils claw at their dresses. It is no big loss, in Vanya’s case, as hers is a worn thing, so dull a shade of blue that it is half-turned to gray. Allison grimaces at the loss of her own velvet riding dress; it had been one of her favorites, and now it is streaked with mud and clung to by burrs.

It strikes her as odd, that the beasts would keep so close to the road; perhaps they know that no one uses it any longer, and favor the patchier undergrowth as a channel through which to drag their spoils. 

“Look,” Vanya cries, as her horse stumbles over a ragged wall of brick, and Allison blinks. They are passing through a blackened husk of a building, so worn down and destroyed that only the foundation remains.

Allison glances around, and the odd stone formations she’d written off reshape themselves: they are the carcasses of forgotten houses and shops, smoke-stained and crumbling and weighed down by gowns of ivy.

“This was a village once,” she says, hushed, as though the ghosts of those who once lived here might hear her, and hiss at her for waking them.

“I didn’t know there  _ was  _ one.” Vanya gazes around, wide-eyed. “All the maps Leonard had said that his was the last one for miles. The last one that had any people in it, anyways.”

“What do you suppose happened?” She peers closer at the molten shape of the brick, “A great fire? One that leapt from one house until the next before anyone could put it out?”

“You don’t suppose it was the beast, do you?”

“Why, of course not. This can’t have happened any earlier than decades ago. What beast do you know that lives as long as that?”

There’s a horrifying crunch under her horse’s hooves, and Allison glances down quickly at first, then cries out in disgust. Her horse has stepped through the burnt, crumbling skull of a dead human being, and there are a dozen-- no,  _ dozens--  _ more packed in around it. 

Allison guides her horse out of what seems to be the ruin of a church, so thoroughly burned that not even its walls remain, only a molten, warped cross half-buried in a pile of fiery oak leaves.

She leaps off its back, holding tightly to the reigns as she bends down to examine the bones. Behind her, Vanya follows suit. 

“It seems the entire town is here,” she says. “You don’t suppose the fire started in the church, and then spread out?”

“Why not run outside then?”

“Perhaps they’d locked the door.”

“Well, why on earth would they do that?”

“Or,” Vanya frowns, “Were  _ they  _ locked  _ in?” _

Allison shudders at the thought: A band of marauders or thieves, sweeping through the village, going door to door and rounding up all its inhabitants, at night perhaps, before setting them ablaze… and as their bodies burned, they must have looted them of what few treasures they had-- sentimental things, like fine dresses or golden cups or tiny gemstones that had been in their families for generations-- and scoured their homes to the ground to cover it all. 

“How wicked!” Allison hisses.

Her horse’s ears are flicking wildly, and he is thrashing his tail, stamping skittishly.

Allison tightens her grip on the reigns, but cannot help but feel deeply unsettled by the sensation of having the great animal between her legs begin to  _ tremble. _

Her horse is nickering nervously to Vanya’s mare, who is shaking her head from side to side, eyes enormous and wild. 

Vanya shushes her horse, rubs its neck soothingly, whispering kind words.

Allison instead pulls her ermine closer about her arms, and glances around sharply. 

Something is rustling in the underbrush across the ruins of the village. 

“Patrick? Claire?”

Allison starts towards it. She is on a stallion, she can outrun anything that leaps at her, and if her husband or her daughter or both are hiding in that bush, she cannot let her fear…

The smell hits her then: the rich, heady reek of freshly-dead animal. Her horse pulls at the bit, so she kicks him forward.

Just beyond the edge of the overgrown clearing, lies one of the horses from the carriage, on its side; its collar and saddle and loin strap still intact. The earth beneath it is soaked black, and she knows instinctively that it is wet with blood.

Its belly has been carved open and is nearly hollowed out of its meat, and the red-streaked ribs curl out of the carcass like a set of bloody fangs. The beasts, whatever they may be, had tracked it here, killed it, and taken their fill of it. 

_ Where is the other horse?  _ she wonders, and glances around for it; there is nothing, not even a trace. It must have broken off from its companion some ways back. 

Allison’s horse is kneading the ground with its hooves, and just behind her she can hear Vanya’s doing the same. She sighs in disgust, and turns to address her sister, to insist that they hurry onwards--

And then she sees it: A shadow, slightly darker than the ones around them. A pair of enormous, muscular shoulders, tensing. A pair of enormous, dark eyes glittering in the last light of day. A face, twisted and horribly familiar, peeling back lips to reveal a mouth of long, pointed fangs. 

Allison lets loose a scream so loud that it sends all the birds in the forest flying for her lives, and she drives her horse forwards, charging at the beast as fast as she can force her animal to go, determined to crush it beneath her hooves.

Behind her, Vanya cries out, and ahead, the monster drops to its back, and skitters on the leaves of the forest floor, before turning and vanishing fluidly back into the dark from which it had come.

It didn’t expect her, she is sure. She is panting harder than her stallion, despite it being he who had done the running, staring viciously into the dark, daring it to come leaping back to her.

It doesn’t. 

They ride on, as fast as they are able, staring worriedly into the dark for monstrous shapes. They have to look hard and long; the sun has passed below the peak of the mountain, and the long, slow alpine twilight is upon them. There are so many places for a hunter to hide, and if she listens hard enough, beneath their frantic hoofbeats, she hears the padding of pawsteps, keeping pace with them.

She kicks her stallion, makes him foam at the force of the bit in his mouth.

_ Closer, we are closer. We shall find their cave, and Patrick and Claire will be there. They will be alive, and we shall ride with them back to the village, and Patrick will be so pleased that I came for him that he shall never want to part from me. He shall never ask of me anything again, and he shall tell everyone in the salons of my heroism.  _

But it isn’t a cave, she soon realizes. It’s a castle.


	5. Chapter 5

They come upon it all at once, the trees suddenly pulling away to reveal the magnificently hideous palace, and the gardens, thick and overgrown as jungle, surrounding it. This, Allison recalls from the villagers’ story, is the palace of Hargreeves. There are no lights on in its windows, and the thing Allison makes out most of all about the palace is its monstrous size, and the way it leans unsteadily down towards them, as if it were a giant, watching eagerly as the two young women approaching it offer themselves to be eaten. 

Allison cries out, calling for Patrick, then Claire. 

As if in response, there comes a melancholic howl in the distance. Not wolf, nor bear, nor great cat, but something far worse. There’s an oddness to the tone that sends a chill down her spine, and she identifies what frightens her so: it is as though a creature is trying to sound like a man, crying out in agony. 

Her pearls cling to her neck, tighter, tighter, tighter, as she leaps from her horse and races up the crumbling steps. They are her mother’s pearls, she cannot remove them, so she bears the discomfort as she runs. 

Allison beats her fists against the grand doors, preparing to tear the lion knockers from them if she must, when they creak open, with a cold rush of damp air, as though the sisters are crawling into a tomb. 

_ Perhaps they have, _ Allison thinks grimly as they slip in. She imagines that some great horrid sickness had come and wiped the king and his sons out, the rule had passed to some distant branch of the family in an even larger castle, and life had carried on, leaving a table’s worth of dead royals to collect dust and mummify.

Vanya is clinging to her sleeve, and she lets her.

The inside of the palace is filthy, the fine wooden floor covered in a fine layer of dirt and decay. Above them, a chandelier shudders and creaks unsteadily. There are bones scattered about, large ones, and seeing them, and the enormous toothmarks adorning them, she knows she has reached the beasts’ lair.

Allison scoops one up, and bears it in her hands like a club. 

In the distance, down a hall, she can hear voices.

Allison picks up her pace, hurrying through a doorway, and is greeted with a sharp spiraling staircase, descending into a darkness that dilates before her like the pupil of a giant’s eye. 

“A dungeon,” she breathes, and begins descending, Vanya a step behind her.

At the bottom of these stairs, she hears the sniffling of her daughter, the voice of her husband, pleading with someone to  _ please let his daughter go at least. _

And a chorus of unfamiliar voices, all squabbling like dogs over a single piece of meat. 

There are less than half a dozen men down here, and perhaps as many dogs, or are those  _ cats  _ or…

Allison gasps when she reaches the bottom of the staircase and sees them: the dungeon is tiny, with only a single cell illuminated by a lantern within its bars. There, she sees Patrick, with Claire huddled into his side, filthy and frightened but  _ alive.  _ And there, in the shadows just beyond them, are their abductors.

The beasts are pacing in a tight circle. They are too large to be wolves, too small to be bears, too twisted to be great cats. And they are talking like men.

“--ail to see how this would lead to any situation in which the curse would expi--”

“--upport good ol’ Luther, taking one for the team and trying men for once--”

“--ife husbandry? So you suppose to  _ repeat  _ what our father did to Mother on her--”

“--ot the same, I swear--”

“Oh? Then  _ explain it _ then!” This last exclamation makes the ground rumble beneath Allison’s feet. 

A second voice, one that is neither old nor young, yet both and neither at the same time, snarls something so quick that Allison has trouble making it out. Something about how imperative it is that they be freed by any means necessary. 

“--Why, Five, that’s a  _ child!” _ booms a thunderous voice, and Allison’s heart pitches with dread.

They are talking about eating her child. They  _ must  _ be. They will tear her from Patrick’s arms, and drag her into the dark and, oh, she’s never cared for her daughter at all, but that certainly doesn’t mean she wants her  _ dead-- _

Allison roars, swinging her bone-club high, and it is immediately smacked from her hand.

An incredible weight slams into her, and the ground flies up to beat the air from her lungs. 

Allison grunts in pain, thrashing against the massive paws pressing her into the stone, and beyond her, Vanya is whimpering, crying out for civility, as if she’s not being held down-- much more  _ gently, _ Allison notes sourly-- by a monster’s pale, gnarled claws. 

“Oh, excellent work, Five,” a higher voice in the shadows trills, “You’ve brought in two  _ more. _ Now there’s one for nearly each of us now, and I for one propose that we draw straws to determine who will be shut out.”

“I didn’t plan for these,” comes the ageless voice, from the creature atop Vanya, “They  _ followed  _ the first two. They just wouldn’t stop, but I didn’t think they’d come  _ this  _ far.”

_ No, _ Allison adjusts herself,  _ These creatures can speak, for they are oddly eloquent in their rough voices, but it is not as men speak. I am listening to five separate avalanches quoting Shakespeare in between tittering like hens over who left the candle burning. _

And  _ these  _ quarrelsome beasts shall be the ones that eat her child? 

_ Unthinkable.  _

“You have already taken one horse,” she says, forcing her voice to boom as loud as theirs through the dungeon. “You should not hunger much, and if you do, the second is likely roaming the forest nearby. My sister and I have brought two more, so if you are starved, you may have them as well.”

There is silence, and Allison feels a shuddering in her undersized heart.  _ Is it not enough? _

Patrick is staring at her, bewildered, and she cannot keep his gaze. She hurt him so  _ much,  _ she who played with the heart of he who truly loved her, and they are here because of  _ her. _

_ This, at least, should set us right.  _

“And if that will not suffice,” her voice rings out, clear as a bell, “You may take me instead.” 

Silence again.

Then: “See, I didn’t think this would work at all, but I must admit Five, this turned out phenomenal.”

There is one figure that towers above all the others, standing on his hind legs beyond her, wrapped tightly in a cloak, with his great tail swishing like a lion’s behind him. She cannot see an inch of his face, like she can those of the others, but she can tell that she is not looking at a human, and that this creature is looking at her.

“Will you be true to your word?” he rumbles, and she wants to laugh. She’s never been true to anything, not to her word, nor her husband, nor her child, nor her sister. 

_ Well, _ she thinks,  _ perhaps this is what it must take to start. _

“Yes,” she replies. “Only let my husband and my child and my sister go free. Let them ride back whence they came, and return to their home in the city. Let them do that, and I shall allow you to have me in return.”

“Done,” rumbles the prince of the beasts, and something firm in his tone reassures something deep in her bones; they will keep their word.

And then the weight on her chest is gone, and Vanya is sighing beyond her, and she hears the rusted door creak open; unlocked it had been this entire time, and none had dared to open it, for fear of being devoured. 

Allison drags herself to her feet, and comes to face her ashen husband, and the child clinging quietly to him. She nods to them, and they start up the stairs with Vanya.

“I shall say goodbye,” she says. It is her last request, they may not refuse her.

And they do not. The pack, illuminated in the weak light of the lantern left in the cell, watch her go. 

Vanya is crying when they reach the door. Patrick is not; he stares at her with a detached sort of reverence, the way he might look at a saint. 

Allison can’t look at him; she doesn’t deserve that. She was terrible to him, and now he shall be free of her. And he may even think of her fondly, years from now when he has a wife who truly loves him, and many more children after Claire. 

Allison feels that phantom pain in her chest strike up at the sight of her daughter, burying her face in her father’s surcoat. She won’t look up, not even to say goodbye, so Allison plants a gentle hand on her back.

_ She’s so young, she might forget all of this, given enough time. And it may be for the best.  _

She does not need to apologize; what she has done will serve as one far greater than any she could deliver with words. She only reaches up to kiss the both of them on the cheek, and then turns to take Vanya into her arms and urge her to go, to take them home and help them recover.

Vanya gives her word, and Allison knows it will be done. Vanya is not like her; she is earnest and full of love, and she will protect them. When she watches them descend to the horses, mount them and ride out, she knows that Vanya will do everything in her power to deliver them to safety.

“You may eat me now,” she says, when they are out of sight. She won't cry or shake. 

One of the creatures, a pale, thin one, breaks into a high squawking laugh. He, she notes, is the talkative one. Lovely. He shall spit flecks of her meat out while telling crude jokes as the beast brothers dine on her. He shall marvel at how tiny and shriveled her heart is, and perhaps she will poison him with it. 

“Eat you?” rumbles the largest of them, the leader. “We don’t want to eat you.”

“No?”  Allison blinks, bringing a gloved hand up to her chest in confusion.  “Then why am I here? What am I to you?”

The prince of the beasts dips his head, as if he’s bashful.  “Our guest.”


	6. Chapter 6

For the first time in her life, Allison knows misery.

She had not been not shown, not guided, but _urged,_ by the flickering, shadowy movements of the creatures she is doomed to spend the rest of her days with, to a heavy black oak door, which she rushed to close behind her before any fangs snapped at her heels.

Allison had hurriedly dragged a heavy table in front of it, and though she eventually returned the table to its proper place, she has not left it since.

The chambers she has been provided are spacious, and covered with an inch of dust; no one has so much as touched the place for many years, and she spends a day acquainting herself with it. This is to be her cell, after all.

The bed is massive, large enough for her to lie in the middle and spread her arms to either side, and still not touch the edges, with four elaborate posters carved with crawling vines. Despite the musty blankets and half-rotten furs piled on it, a bone-deep chill seeps into her, and she sleeps dreamlessly for long hours, somehow waking more tired each time.

Eventually, perhaps hours or days or decades later, she drags herself from her sleep, and forces herself to explore the rest of her rooms.

There’s a lavatory, which she uses when it suits her, and an enormous porcelain tub that is filled with water that is frigid and makes her hiss, but is otherwise clean. She will have to open the door to have it changed, so she uses it over and over, watches it grow filmy with the ancient soap she has found. 

There is a great wardrobe, filled with gowns that are of a style she cannot place. They are all moth-eaten and faded, and the wrong size; they had obviously been meant for someone else, someone much slighter than she. Allison tries each one on, as something to do, and then chooses to keep her velvet traveling dress on, even as it starts to smell. 

And there are many things to sit and lounge upon, which she does. They are old and creak wearily under her weight, and they are just things to sit upon. She bores of them immediately. 

Allison also notes what is not in the room: there are no books of any kind, no art supplies, only samplers and spools of thread, which she destroys in an hour. Whoever had lived here had cared little for reading.

She keeps looking to the door, which has a gouge in it; ancient claw marks from years ago. Allison spends hours imagining the fate of another poor woman who had been sealed in here, that the pack of monsters had grown hungry enough to have her, and that the door bears a scar from that horrid encounter.

The gouge is wide enough to peer through, and despite herself, Allison spends most of her time staring. 

The first time she does, she is drawn by the stuttering sound of footsteps, of bare feet sticking to hardwood and overgrown nails clicking, and she clings to the door like shelter in a storm-- is there someone here, apart from her?

A shadow limps out from around a dark corner, and before Allison can cry out-- in delight, in fear, in greeting-- she watches it drop to all fours, suddenly sinuous and feline, sniffing the air and letting out a low fox-like whoop. In spite of her better self, Allison leans forward, determined to find a better look, and she leans on the handle.

The rusty squeak of it turning beneath her hand is as loud as a train’s metal wheels screaming against the rails, and Allison acts appropriately, leaping away from the door as though it were about to suck her down below the sparking wheels, and throwing herself back behind her bed, which she peers over, to watch the shadows dance beneath the floor.

There’s a high-pitched sound, almost like a chuckle, and then a soft, wet _snuff,_ a _squelch_ , and a flurry of movement. Then, nothing at all.

The door, Allison realizes, had been unlocked the entire time, and she is grateful that there is no one to see the color rise in her cheeks. 

She can leave anytime she pleases, and it pleases her to stay here a while longer. So she spends more time, poised at the gouge, pressing her forehead to it as she peers through, observing her captors.

There are five in total; she knows this with certainty, and after a while, she knows them all by sight, and knows their movements as well as she can.

The first of them, the one whose voice she knows from the dungeon cell, who had begun her imprisonment, does not appear at all.

She does not see the second of them at all during the day; this one is closest in resemblance to a panther, or perhaps a wolf, with a mouthful of sharp dagger-like teeth, long claws that never retract and tear into the floors, and a line of prickling spines down his back. If it comes to it, this is the one that will kill her, she is sure.

The one that appears most frequently has pale, thin fur and a stooped-over, quick gait, and a high voice that bounces down the hall long before he does. Everything about him is long and thin, from his limbs to his blue-toed paws, to the ribs which show starkly through his thin pelt-- he is the one she is most certain will _try_ to eat her, though she is certain she could dissuade him with a well-placed kick-- and he has a long, purple tongue that lolls from his mouth. His eyes are wide and curious in dark sockets, and a few times Allison leaps back from the door, as he pads near, peeking through the crack beneath it, inquisitive as a monkey.

Almost always with him, padding after him, is a companion it had taken Allison several days to realize was there at all; this one is utterly silent, with a great slit in his belly where purplish prehensile intestines poke out to prod curiously at the things he passes. She does not doubt that he could open her door, if he so chose, and is grateful that he will not.

They wander in and out at a languid pace; the pace of creatures that know they cannot possibly die, and therefore have all the time in the world to reach where they are going.

The fifth comes and goes intermittently, thin and swift- skittering as fast as a lizard, sleek as a weasel, becoming a bluish blur in her vision as he moves. Allison has been to the cinema parlors since they’d first opened, and finds the choppy, flickering movement of this creature similar to those images she’d seen projected; she sees the suggestion of movement, rather than the movement itself. She is still uncertain as to what exactly he looks like, and is only grateful that he never lingers. 

She soon learns that the pack are gone by day, dispersing off to roam the overgrown grounds as if patrolling; when the sun sets, they return from wherever they’ve been wandering to mill about the palace halls. She is careful to always be in her room at this time, with the wardrobe pulled in front of the door, though it has never been so much as tapped on by any of the beasts. 

They gather outside her door sometimes, in twos or threes, and Allison listens to their breathing and their growling half-voices, becoming practiced at distinguishing them from one another by the tiny sounds they make. None enter, and for this she is grateful.

Every morning, she finds something dropped on her doorstep; Rabbits, with deep gouges in their necks, still warm and sometimes twitching, or hunks of raw meat that she is able to distinguish is either deer or boar, based on the pattern on the pelt still stuck to it.

Allison turns up her nose at them at first; if they are trying to plump her up, they will do so on something finer. She refuses one scrap of meat, and another is provided for her; a bird exchanged for a rabbit, or a piece of deer, or a fish. She comes to assume they believe that she is simply a picky eater, and laughs a little at this.

She gives in not longer after that. Hunger has been eating away at her, until the corners of her mind go dark and shimmery, and she is unused to being hungry. 

Allison eats with a grimace, pinching her nose, and is able to get some of it down without gagging too much. The rest of the time, she is spent bent over the windowsill, relieving herself down onto the bushes below. 

“If you are trying to fatten me up,” she says to the door, thinking herself alone, “You are doing a terrible job.”

There’s a chuff from the other side of the door, and she nearly leaps out the window in fright. 

Allison tries to hold out, but she is unused to being alone, confined to one small area, to being _unentertained._

The boredom becomes too much to bear, and she at last decides that she will risk it, and slips out into the crumbling halls to explore. She seldom comes across one of the creatures on her journeys; and when she does, they do not bother to follow her when she races back the way she’d come. One, the thin, pale one, laughs, and the sharp one chuffs, but none give chase.

She could flee, she supposes. If she runs fast enough, she might make it. Her sister and husband and daughter are likely far enough away now that they are out of the reach of the beasts, should they go hunting for them, though Allison gets the sense that they won’t, that they _can’t,_ that this palace and the woods surrounding it are where they are bound to stay. 

She could flee, but she won’t. It’s the principle of the thing: she made a promise to stay, and so she will. And through her keeping her word, as absurd as it seems, Allison feels that she might find redemption here, and if not redemption, then at least absolution. She’s caused so much pain; the least she can do is refrain from causing any more.

Allison wanders in slow spiraling circles, through the dozens of halls, making a map in her mind of the dark cell underground, the dining hall with the table long enough to host a hundred guests, the library with its books piled high in haphazard slopes, and none whatsoever on the scarred shelves, the massive armory with its contents long given over to rust and ruin. 

The palace is in ill repair, with crumbling plaster and corners matted with cobwebs occupied by spiders as large as her hand, and there are patches of roof in the upper level of the palace that are missing, entire floors that have begun the slow process of collapse, so she steps lightly. The warping wooden floor, in some places, sags beneath her feet with a slight moan and she hops skittishly away, as though it will collapse beneath her feet with the strength of waterlogged paper. There are carpets that have long-since rotted away or sprung up patchy gardens of grass or luminous mushrooms. The walls are no better, stained with mold, and with creature-shaped holes gnawed through them, as though the monsters in Allison’s prison could not have been bothered to simply use the door. 

She tries counting the rooms, and gives up. She tries searching for windows that are perfectly intact, and finds none; even the ones in her own rooms are cracked and jagged. She searches for a mirror, but all are shattered.

She explores the bedrooms, and finds most eviscerated; one in particular, with a high ceiling and green-painted walls, is utterly ravaged by furious claw marks. The cushions in the wreckage of the bed had been torn to ribbons, and feathers were strewn everywhere. A room she supposes had once been an infirmary, or a warlock’s workshop, is especially devastated, and she spends a while picking through scrawled spells and trying to discern their secrets.

There is one thing that Allison finds truly remarkable about the palace, ruined as it is: the way the sound is caught in the walls is like nothing she’s ever seen, like she and these beasts are living in the hollow of an enormous violin, endlessly passing sounds back and forth to one another. She can hear chuffs and cries and fragments of words she recognizes rolling up a hallway that might’ve been spoken hours ago, even winces at the tinniness of her own voice, as she realizes how vacuous she had sounded a day ago, demanding a maid come to her rooms and refill her bath-- there are no maids; there are no servants at all, just her and the five creatures, yet the bath had been refilled, with a great deal of water spilled across her floor, when she returned.

Allison decides, when she is certain that she is alone-- the beasts have gone prowling, perhaps to hunt-- to play with the acoustics. She takes up her voice for the first time in weeks, and plays with it, letting out one golden, sweet, liquid note. She sharpens it to a run, then a lilting melody, and stops to listen to herself, thrumming off into the distance and around a corner, and decides that this place may be liveable yet.

That night, she hears the chatter of voices rumble up the stairs from a long-unused ballroom to meet her; they have _heard_ her, she hears. They have heard her voice, and are _excited_ by it, and she is privately thrilled.


	7. Chapter 7

She suspects she has been here nearly a month, when she finds the gallery, crowded floor to ceiling with works of art. There is a chaise, in front of an image of a woman, reclining with ease, and seated on that chaise, oddly, is a person-sized figure made entirely of porcelain.

Allison peers at it closely. Despite its incredible age, and the way the glaze has faded to a dull gray-white, she can tell that it had once been nearly lifelike in its coloring. The figure, which is of a young woman about her age, is comprised of dozens of tiny moving parts bound together by joints of tarnished, rusted metal that might have been gold once, long ago. Her face is smoothed into an eternal placid smile--which, Allison notes, a little oddly, seems quite sad-- with gemstones for eyes and ruby lips. Somewhere inside her cracked china head, there is a soft ticking noise, as if someone had left a clock inside of it.

Something about the figure, despite its incredible beauty, puts her at unease, so she slips down a side hallway, where a diamond of late afternoon light shines against the water-warped wooden floor. 

This hall is also adorned by art; it is lined by massive portraits, as tall as she. There are six, but there is a strange gap in the wall between two, where the wood is a brighter color, that indicates to her that there had been a seventh. 

All, save one, have been desecrated, with ragged claw marks drawn across their bodies, over their throats, holes in the canvas where their faces should be, but aren’t. 

On the end closest to the door through which she has entered, the lone portrait that remains intact watches her placidly; it is a woman in radiant pink with sunbeams in her hair, an arresting, unnatural beauty, and an eerily white smile that splits her face in two. Her look plucks at Allison, like the string of a harpsichord, playing _remember, remember, remember,_ but she cannot recall the whole of the tune, so she lets it echo away inside of her until there is silence again. 

The woman’s painted eyes watch Allison closely as she passes, and she finds herself glancing unsteadily back at her, as though the figure in the frame will spring to life, crawl out and reach for her.

It does not; but she still looks. 

Her name, Allison assumes, had been what was carved into the frame: _Lady Grace._

She is the frighteningly young wife, Allison assumes, to the figure furthest from her, at the end of the gallery hall. Based on the gild adorning his frame, Allison decides that he must be the lord. The two of them had ruled this palace, a long time ago, before it had emptied out and become the nest of monsters.

She cannot make out a single feature of his; the canvas of his portrait has been so slashed and gnawed that it is a crumpled shred clinging to the frame, with a man-shaped scar in the center of it all. Helpfully, there is a name engraved in the frame: _Lord Reginald Hargreeves_ , and she mouths it to herself, far too suspicious to dare saying it aloud, for fear of summoning some frightful spirit. 

Between the two of them, despite the distress the portraits have endured, Allison is still able to make out the subjects: _these,_ she concludes, _are their sons._

There are four that are present, and the missing space at the right of the lord’s must be the fifth. Though their paintings are desecrated, enough remains to infer their names-- _Diego, Klaus, Five, Ben;_ she repeats them in her head, over and over like a nursery rhyme, tries to find some hidden meaning to it and finds none-- and their features: perhaps, they were handsome once, but what Allison is certain of is that they cannot possibly have had the same parents. 

There is too great a disparity between their features: one brother with warm brown skin, the others pale, one with frighteningly pale eyes, another with dark ones, one thin as a rail, another well-muscled and powerful. 

Allison wonders at the lack of continuity between them, but carries on to the door at the end of the hall, which is unlocked.

She enters a bedroom, the latest of many she has come across-- she numbers them now at forty-two in total-- but this is the only one she has found, apart from her own, that seems somewhat maintained.

The only window in the entire palace that is unbroken is here, so scrubbed with dirt that Allison cannot make out a single thing through it, yet somehow able to cast a dim, yellowish light on the contents of the room; beams of it are shining through a gap in a heavy velvet curtain. The rich, heavy furniture is still intact, and the books on the shelves-- astronomy, botany, tales of chivalry in the courts of King Arthur, music-- are not torn to flecks of paper at all, but perfectly intact, and waiting to be read. A pair of enormous, ancient leather boots are kicked haphazardly to a corner of the room, as though the man who had once stepped into them intended to come back for them shortly, and there are carved birds and wagons and horses-- _toys,_ she realizes-- arranged carefully on a small side table coated with an inch of dust.

 _Someone had lived here once,_ she thinks, and it is the first time it has truly occurred to her that the place she is confined to had once been a home.

She looks to the bed, which is smaller than hers, and realizes with a start that someone still does: there is a nest piled up at the center of it: pillows and blankets torn to ribbons, soft things piled in a hole, with a dent at the center where a massive thing sleeps. She can smell it, wet musky fur, and oddly, it does not make her pinch her nose in disgust at all. She breathes in again. 

The missing portrait is here, leaning against a low oak table, directly across from the bed. Unlike its brothers, it is unscarred. Unlike its mother, at the edges, Allison makes out discoloration, and senses that it is nearly ready to tear through.

Allison can make out every last feature: the broad, strong shoulders, the high collar of his uniform, the sleek golden hair, the sharp gray eyes, the confident set to his jaw. Here is a beautiful man with the world at his feet, and he sits, away from his brothers, rotting at the corners.

His name, says the carved space at the base of the frame, is Luther.

Allison says it aloud, not thinking.

She has forgotten the rule of names, and the power of her voice, and therefore, she summons a spirit with her word.

Slowly, as she traces the lines of the portrait’s face, she feels a prickle trace the edge of her spine; something is at the edge of her senses, and she draws in a quick breath, going still to listen.

Behind her, are tiny, clicking footsteps, and a steady clocklike ticking that is growing louder, louder, _louder._

Allison twists, snatching an ancient penknife off the nearby table, ready to lunge--

And drops it in shock, once she sees what is behind her.

It is that porcelain creature she had passed on her way in, staring at her with the painted look of pleasantness that had adorned her face in the gallery, but now she is on her feet, standing before her with her fingers folded passively in front of her, like a maid awaiting orders. They are not made of china like the rest of her; they are the rusted needle-like fingers of a skeleton, clicking metallically against her fragile breast. Perhaps her fragile skin had broken away years ago, and now she is left with only the bones. 

“I had heard from my sons that you would be living with us now. Thank you for coming to me; you see, I could not come meet you otherwise. You know, I’ve never had a daughter before…”

The creature is speaking in cool, bell-like tones, but her lips are not moving, nor her jaw. Her voice is rising from some unknown source within her hollow porcelain head, and leaves her in echoes. 

Perhaps there is a spirit there, Allison wonders, and she is peering out at me through the windows of this being’s gemstone eyes.

Allison looks into her eyes, looks _deeply,_ and finds nothing behind them.

This, she finds so much more terrifying.

“Sons,” Allison repeats. 

And she remembers. The names on the frames, the number of creatures, the strangeness of their forms, the way they _speak…_ The villagers, Allison realizes, have gotten it all wrong. The lord’s sons had never summoned the monsters...

 _“They’re_ the monsters. Your sons, they--”

“Are quite different-looking now,” the fragile lady says, turning slowly. “My son Luther would not appreciate you being in his room without permission, dear. He’s been having such a difficult time lately, and I think it best that we respect his boundaries. I suggest that you follow me back. I am tiring from following you, and will need to rest.”

Dumbly, Allison follows her out of the room. 

_She is a living doll,_ Allison realizes, _an automaton;_ Grace moves slowly, as if she’d been wound up long ago and is reaching the last of her energy, and will soon freeze in place, until someone reaches into some space in her back where the mechanism that powers her hides and gives her the power of movement once more. Her movements are slow and labored, and she takes every tiny step carefully, as though the wrong china foot in the wrong place will cause her to slip and shatter.

Allison notes a frightening crack in Grace’s forehead, and wonders if she has fallen already. She adjusts her own gait, keeps herself keenly alert, arms slightly extended to catch her, if she does slip. 

They return to her chaise, where Grace arranges herself with great practice, and Allison uncertainly settles in beside her.

She keeps her back straight, hands folded pleasantly in her lap; she is practiced at conversation, knows exactly how to sit, and far more importantly, how to cast her voice out to convince the lady of the house to give her everything she wants.

But this strange clockwork creature is immune to Allison’s voice. After they introduce themselves and engage in the customary pleasantries, she simply does not respond to Allison’s urgings; she only nods, and replies “It will be done,” passively, until Allison’s requests trail off into the dusty silence.

“How did this happen?” she tries. “You were a woman once, and they were men, and now you’ve been transformed.”

“Oh, dear,” Grace sighs, “It was so long ago, I can hardly remember it. It’s like an echo, you know, ringing and ringing and fading into wind. But I remember enough, I suppose. My husband was a great man. A great ruler, and adventurer, and hunter and sorcerer, and he raised our sons to follow in his greatness. Did you know that this grand home of his was once lit top to bottom with light, and it was the finest place in the world to visit?”

“I did not. I wish only that I could have seen it.”

A massive spider crawls out from a gap between two of Grace’s porcelain pieces, and settles on her like a grotesque brooch. She does not flinch, nor shriek, does not seem to realize it is there at all.

“It did, and because of its greatness it attracted its downfall. When you are great, you see, many people will conspire to take that greatness from you. And so came a witch one night, to do so. But cunning as he is, my husband escaped her into the arms of death. Alas none of us were able to follow; my sons fought valiantly, but were no match for the witch’s powers. And so we are now doomed to be this.”

Grace holds up an automated hand, stares with that forever-blank face at the silver shine her fingers take on. “We are forevermore bound to these bodies, and to this palace, deathless, until we are freed by love.” She trails off, tilting her head as if she were nodding off, as if telling the tale itself were sapping her strength.

“Freed by love? How do you mean?”

“Oh, dear, don’t worry about that. It’s impossible, you see. My sons, bless their hearts, seem not to have realized it yet, but someday they will. I am sorry that you’re caught up in all of this.”

“What?”

“That’s why you’re _here._ My sons seem to think that you will free them from this.”

Allison feels a laugh bubbling up like tar inside her. “You think _I_ could _love_ them?” She, who could not love her perfectly lovely husband and child. She, with her cold, small heart, could _never--_

“No,” Grace replies, “No, you misunderstood. Not all of them. Just Luther. And what’s far more important, my son must love _you._ He must love you enough to part from you.”

“Why, that makes no sense.”

“It isn’t meant to. It’s not a curse that’s meant to be broken; that’s the brilliance of it. Relax, dear, and settle in. You will be cared for as well as we are able. Do not feel pressured by the weight of forces beyond your control.”

The spider crawls back home, into a gap between Grace’s neck and her shoulder, and Allison wants to spring up and throw herself out a window.

“You know,” she says, “Our butler was with us, at the beginning. But he was not cursed as we were, and he grew older, and older, and then he was not there anymore. I kept looking, but I could not find him anywhere, and now I’ve grown too tired to look any longer. We have been here for so _long._ Now I am too tired to do much else than walk down the hall, and my home is falling to pieces in front of me, and love shall never come.”

A strange feeling takes hold of Allison then, as though somewhere deep within her chest, a wave was swelling. On the crest of that wave was an emotion she had felt so little that she did not have a name for it. Allison, who is not used to the ways of the ocean, finds herself anxious to crush its movements, and what it had been carrying to shore, against an imagined seawall. 

“I cannot imagine the pain you must feel,” Allison treads carefully, “At the loss of your friend.”

She starts at the tinkling, glasslike laugh that chatters from Grace’s marble throat.

“Why,” Grace says, “I do not feel anything at all, not truly.”

“This curse, it took the ability from you?”

“No, certainly not. My dear husband did. It was his gift to me, on our wedding night, you see; he cured me of my fears and my pains, and allowed me to live without worry. You cannot imagine how blessed I am.”

“No,” Allison replies truthfully, “I cannot imagine.”

“I am calm, and I am content, and the love of my sons keeps me warm. That is all I can ever have, and so it is.”

Allison, for the first time in her life, is at a loss for words.

“I am happy here, you see, because I _must_ be happy here. I cannot _not_ be happy here. I am in my home, with my sons, and all is well.”

She feels, strangely, like she wants to cry.

When she returns to her bed--to Grace’s bed, she now knows it to be-- she curls into a ball, and lets the feeling flood her.

She buries her mouth into her hands and spends the night wailing. Allison cannot tell _who_ she is crying for: her sister, miles away and binding herself to an empty husband; her own husband, bereft over wasting years of his life to her; her daughter, who she feels so little for, that she has not thought of her at all until this very night, and only to wonder placidly how she is doing. She is no different than these creatures to whom she is now bound, just as wretched. She will never leave this place; she is far too unloveable.

She cries herself empty, and then sleeps long and deep, and then wakes and carries on as she had before, wandering like a ghost through the crooked halls of the palace. She doesn't know what else to do.


	8. Chapter 8

It is on that day, the one in which she learns of her captors’ curse, that Allison finds a place that she decides she will make her own. Each of her beasts have their own favored haunts within the palace, and now, being their permanent guest-- as there is certainly no chance that she might save her hosts from their predicament-- she must make her own. 

She chooses a towertop room, free of rot or the encroachment of the wild, with a wide windowsill, where she has taken to sitting. 

She goes there often, after she detects the pattern in the pack’s movements after dark; they stalk through the palace halls, but in patterns that are predictable enough, and she devises a route that will take her up to the towertop room without interruption.

On her route up, she passes the gallery, where she now knows she can reliably see the panther-like creature, the one her intuition tells her must be Diego. He is curled protectively like an immense lapdog around Grace’s delicate form, his great head in her lap, a soft stuttering rumble rolling out of his chest as she runs her needle-fingers gently through the short fur at the top of his head. 

Allison does not allow herself to linger upon the sight, only accepts it and carries on. 

Once there, Allison kicks off her boots and sits in the windowsill, her legs dangling in open space. She looks up, at the enormous stars flickering through a gash in the clouds, and realizes she has never seen them this luminous before; away from the bright core of the city, she can now see them properly.

Allison drinks it in, returning night after night to take in the stars. They are the same ones her sister is looking at. She will have reached the city by now, and… oh. She will be in the city, and will not be able to see any of them.

One night, when there is not a cloud in the sky, and she has a perfect view of the heavy silver disc of the moon, she looks at it and is hit with a pang of longing. For her sister, but strangely, not for her husband or child. She has thought of the two of them so little in the time she has been here, yet she had come here for  _ them. _

_ I truly did care for them so little, _ she thinks.  _ I have carried this seed of guilt in me for so long, and now that I am here, I am free of it, and they are free of me. _

She stays there, watching the moon, until it sinks beneath the sky, and slowly, as though she were adjusting to the dimness of a room without candlelight, she becomes aware of the living, breathing shadow that had ascended the creaking wooden steps, and slid into place at a respectful distance behind her. 

Oddly, she is not deterred by its presence at all, even makes a game of listening to the sound of its chest heaving behind her. She knows that sound, knows who it belongs to.

“Are you Luther?” she asks.

“Yes,” he rumbles hesitantly from behind her, in a voice like a purr.

“Well,” Allison removes one of her gloves, turning to extend to him a hand, as is proper. “It’s nice to finally meet you. My name is Allison, not that you ever thought to ask me.” 

He is wrapped in that great dark cloak again, but in the weak silvery-blue shine of the moon, she can make out the slopes of his twisted shoulders, the outline of his head. She hears him mutter a hushed apology, and smiles indulgently.

_ He is staring at my hand, _ she is sure,  _ from deep within that cloak, where I cannot see him. He is preparing to bite it off with his fangs, he is-- _

He is holding her hand in his paw, which is massive and worn, with the great claws filed down to the nub. She can sense his strength in the way his touch is so particular in its lightness, for fear of crushing her. He gently brings his cloaked head down to kiss it, and she feels the heat of his breath warm her. Her heart is hammering, but she isn’t afraid at all.

This had been the man in the painting. This had been the man with the gray eyes who’d worn enormous boots, and read shelves of books. This is the man who is meant to set his family free, and she will fail him.

“I am sorry,” she says, surprising herself with the seriousness of her tone, “That you’ve chosen so poorly. Your mother told me, of this curse you are all suffering, and I am afraid I cannot break it.”

He cocks his head.

“I am simply not capable of love, I am afraid.”

Luther shrugs. “No one is, upon seeing me.”

“No, you misunderstand; I can love no one at all. Not my husband, nor my child, nor even my sister. I am simply too cold. Bringing me here was a great waste of time on your part. Your curse won’t be broken.”

“I was not the one to bring you here. That was my brother. He still insists that we try and free ourselves.”

“And you’ve given up?”

“I’ve accepted the reality of it all. That is all.”

“Then why have me here, if there’s truly no chance?”

He won’t answer. He only withdraws, slipping further back into the shadows, where he seems most confident. 

“Are you…” He pauses, seems to gather the words, “Settling in well? Is everything to your liking, I mean?”

“And it has taken you an entire month to ask me this?”

“You didn’t exactly make it easy. This is the first time I’ve seen you leave your room.”

“Yet you knew where I would be.”

“I followed your scent.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. And I must promise you again: We will not eat you. Please believe that I am a man of my word, and nothing terrible will befall you here.” She envisions him stuffed in a suit of armor, with an enormous globe-like helmet, and smiles a bit. “Now, if you need anything at all, I want you to know that you can ask me, and I’ll do everything in my power to obtain it for you.”

Right, Allison remembers: this is the commandant of the pack of creatures roaming her palatial prison. She stares in thinly-veiled disdain at her surroundings, and notes that he certainly doesn’t seem to have much power at all, not if it looks like  _ this. _

“Well,” she says, “I would first like to offer a complaint to you about what I am being served.”

“Yes?”

“I hate it. Every morning, one of your brothers slops my food across the floor. What’s more, I am fed carrion, or raw meat with the fur mixed into it so thoroughly that I cough up hairballs after I eat, assuming that I don’t cough up the rest of the creature with it. Have you  _ really  _ no means of skinning your kills? Or cooking them?”

“I… I thought Ben did that.” He cocks his head, like a great dog, then shakes it. “Alright. I’ll have a talk with them, and see what can be done.”

“Good.”

“Now, is there anything else?”

“What are you, my valet?”

“No,” he shakes his head, “I am your host. You are the first guest I’ve ever had, and I intend to get it right.” 

There’s an earnestness to his tone that she isn’t used to at all, and it makes something in her chest flutter, for just a moment. She dips her head, to hide the flush that comes over her.

Actually, now that she  _ thinks  _ of it… “As your guest then, where might I go within your palace.”

“Anywhere.”

_ “Any _ where?”

“Anywhere in the palace. Anywhere on the grounds. There are no secrets here; all the locks rusted away long ago.” 

“And if I tried to leave?”

“You are a woman of your word. You won’t.”

“But if I did?”

“But you won’t.” 

He’s childish, in the way he won’t even imagine the possibility that she is exactly who she is. Something in her aches at the simplicity of it. Maybe she should try, then, to be worthy of his trust. 

“Now,” he says, “May I ask you something?”

“Certainly.”

“Why do you favor  _ here, _ of all places?”

“Oh.” She blinks. “I like being above everything, I guess. The higher I am, the less it feels like someone can reach me, and the less someone will be able to see me if I am watching them far below. I’ve done this before, you know, with my sister when we were children.”

“How do you mean?”

“We would sit in the window with our legs hanging out, and watch the streets below, and the people we would see there. We used to make up games where we would try to spot the most interesting things. Carriages and fine dresses and architecture and what the people in the windows opposite us might be arguing about.”

“I don’t suppose the view you have now is half as interesting. It’s a lot quieter out here.”

“Well, quiet is…” Allison shrugs, “It’s nice. And I can see the moon much better, and the stars. It’s not a bad trade.”

She can tell, by the way that he cocks his head, that he is smiling, but he says nothing more. He merely dips his head, and slips out. 

When she pads back to her room, the watery light of morning is streaming through the windows-that-are-not-windows, and she finds, piled carefully at her doorstep, a heavy volume on the moon and its phases, with exquisite illustrations. Atop it, served on a dainty, if tarnished, silver dish in a watery puddle of what she assumes is blood, is a charred glob of meat. 

She takes it down, and does not wince at the taste.


	9. Chapter 9

She spends every night in her tower, and every night she hears his heavy, laboring steps as he comes up to join her. Every night he pauses at the doorway, awaiting entry, and every night she gives it. And they sit, his great shoulder brushing hers, and talk quietly for hours, until the sky pales. 

His, she thinks, is the first voice she’s ever heard that interests her more than her own. It’s hesitant, yet powerful, like the distant boom of a thunderstorm a valley away, yet his words are stilted, like he’s gone so long without speaking that he’s half forgotten how. 

She approaches Luther with great care; he must love her, and he must love her so much that it will set them all free. She is not a loveable thing, but she can pretend to be one.

So she draws upon the art of conversation she’d developed for years in the city to guide him through conversations about moons and stars and distant planets, about the strange things his brothers did that day, about her husband and sister and daughter, about how the flowers in the overgrown beds once bloomed, about anything at all.  She is not holding court, she is not proving her worth, she is not digging for some secret piece of information that she might use to harm him; she is merely talking. It has been a long time since she has done that.

He keeps himself wrapped in that great cloak, which she now realizes had once been a heavy velvet curtain, perhaps one he’d taken down from the windows in his room, and he does not let her see his face. She has not pressed the issue yet, nor has she ventured further into wondering about how his curse had come to be; she can sense it is like an open wound, and she will not stick her fingers into it unnecessarily. It is important to be as courteous to one’s host as they are to you. 

Still, she wonders.

Allison is still not at home here, but she is no longer afraid; she is protected, so they say, and even if she had not been when she had first been brought to her room, she has since befriended the king of the beasts, and therefore has obtained his favor.

She has lost the fear to stand in the presence of his brothers. She simply carries her head high, and behaves as though it’s the most natural thing in the world to pick through the mountains of discarded books to find a new volume, as the brother she has determined is Ben stares at her with his wolfish jaw hanging open. To him, she supposes, it is as though a unicorn had come wandering into his corner of the palace. 

They do not seek her out, nor do they chatter snidely among themselves about the unkemptness of her hair, or the way she is slouching, or the way she plays with her mother’s pearls in the nervous way that she does, and she begins to care not at all what they think. It’s an oddly freeing feeling, like a weight she hasn’t realized she’s been carrying for years has suddenly been removed from her shoulders. 

And once she sets her mind to it, she finds it quite easy to swallow the initial revulsion she feels whenever she sees one of the creatures walking her way as she wanders the grounds.  _ They were men once, _ she reminds herself, and she can almost see their shapes, buried beneath monstrous skins, forced to walk on all fours and growl.  _ They were men once, and they are as trapped here as I, and we must tolerate each other. _

For the most part, they do. The peace that settles over them is quiet, falling as the leaves do; they have all grown used to each other, to the unspoken routine they have developed, and though Allison is not particularly accepted by the rest of the pack, they at least tolerate her, and their leader enjoys her very much. She tours the grounds, and reads from the library, and rolls up her sleeves to learn to cook the meat they bring her, and does not wonder at how strange her situation is. All the laws of nature are suspended, and all things are now possible.

And then, of course, the tentative truce she’s forged with her beastly hosts comes crashing down.

It happens suddenly, and without warning, though in hindsight, Allison will chide herself for not seeing it coming. The palace is old, and given over to ruin. Of course, it would crumble, and of course, the ancient cobwebbed chandelier hanging above their heads in the ruined foyer would be no exception.

It’s the rain, she thinks, that does it.

They’d spent a week trapped by the torrential pouring of a seasonal storm, and Allison had fought a losing battle against the ragged hole in the roof of her tower. She, begrudgingly, became accustomed to listening to the water drop from the rotting wood of the ceiling onto the alabaster floors of the palace’s first floor, so used by now to the spectacular decay that she had not considered the accelerating effect the storm would have on it.

She is in the foyer, sitting stupidly in the middle of the floor, watching water drip in a steady stream from the crystals of the chandelier into a set of crystal glasses she’d found in a long-abandoned cupboard, listening to the creaking of the palace’s rotting walls around her. 

And then comes the weight, barreling her over, sending her skidding on her back across the ivory floor, breathless and terrified.

Then, the metallic cry of the ancient chandelier, jolting, and then ripping loose from the weary ceiling in a cloud of plaster.

And the tinkling, musical crash.

Allison gapes at the sight of the ancient chandelier, shattering over Luther’s great back, crunching, shuddering, crumpling and clinging to him like a collar, before he roughly wrenches it off of him. Crystals pour from his shoulders like raindrops, and there is a moment where his hood pulls away, and she sees the sharp curve of his face, and his sad, bright eyes looking at hers, widening with shock.

As the chandelier screeches to the floor, it snags his makeshift cloak with him, and pulls swiftly off of his great shoulders.

And he flees, so suddenly quick that Allison only makes out a blur of brown as he retreats, the force of his pawsteps booming down the halls. 

She is left lying winded on the floor, staring after him, suddenly hungry to see what he had been so bent on hiding. 

So Allison untangles his makeshift cloak from the chandelier, balling it up in her hands. Her voice is coiled in her chest, ready to leap out and strike at her behest, to weave a half-false tale about how she only wanted to return his cloak to him, not to see what is beneath it.

She slips up to the painted gallery, down the hall of faces, and to her host’s door. It is closed, but there is a crack in it, wide enough to see through, and Allison cannot resist the urge to peer through it.

He is inside, pacing like a tiger in tight circles. The curtains are tightly drawn, but she can still make out the shape of him, as he passes into a thin beam of watery afternoon light. 

There is something especially twisted about his shape, weighed down by the excessive muscle packed onto his shoulders and upper back, and unlike his brothers, his muddy brown fur has grown in thin and patchy, with enormous stretches of cracked, leathery skin left bare.

_ Is it naturally this way,  _ she wonders,  _ or has he been tearing at it for years, trying to get it to stop? _

Now that she is looking, she  _ sees  _ it: deep gouges in his sides, in his bruising back. Scars, old and new. Does he think that if he just claws deep enough, he will find his true body, cocooned deep beneath it all?

Allison, despite herself, hears herself gasp.

And he tenses; she hears him catch her scent, sees the ripple of muscle roll up his back and draw up his haunches, the slow turn of his great shaggy head as he twists to face her.

She realizes her error, and the enormity of what she’s done crashes over her like a wave: She, like the unloveable creature that she is, has clawed at his wound with her nails, has seen him in some forbidden way. Now he is about to react as any wounded beast will: he will surely devour her. 

Allison turns, dropping the cloak in her arms, and starts running.

She flies past Grace, down three sets of stairs and six hallways she knows by heart, out the great doors and down the crumbling steps. 

He will hate her, for trespassing in the way she has, and so she must flee. Damn all possibility of breaking this curse. Damn the consequences of breaking her word. She’s done it so often before, what does it matter if she does it again? These creatures may never leave the bounds of the wild; they will never reach her in the city.

The icy wind slices over Allison’s back, carrying her down the precipitous slope of the mountain, as though it approves of her escape. 

Allison slides in the soaked leaves and mud of the forest floor, but she keeps going. The trees offer no respite from the rain; they have since gone bare, and reach with branches like witch fingers towards the sky, which is flat and so low, it seems like a deep gray ceiling she could reach up and touch. 

Allison runs, half-skidding through the wild, her heart drumming in her ears so loudly that she cannot hear if a set of massive feet are pounding after her, oh but they must be--

A shape flickers in front of her, and she sees a narrow maw rimmed by pale fangs suddenly stretch wide open.

Allison stops dead in her tracks, but the slickness of the mud beneath her feet keeps her moving, sending her flying onto her backside. She scrambles, reaching for the nearest branch. She may not win this fight, but she’ll give him a good whack before he tears her limb from--

It’s not Luther.

It’s  _ Five, _ she realizes, and drops her weapon in surprise. He is before her, the fleet-footed creature who seldom lingers long enough to catch a glimpse of, who hardly looks at her, let alone talks to her. The one with the ageless voice, and, now that he is crouched in front of her, an ageless face as well. 

Five, who she has never seen linger in a single place as long as he is, whose… leg is jutting out at an odd angle. 

In the gray light of the rainstorm, Allison takes a moment to register it: a hunter’s trap, a set of metal jaws, are closed tightly around his hind paw, which is twitching like a dying rabbit. 

“Oh,” she says, suddenly understanding what has happened, and reaches forward to help him with it. “Here, let me--”

Unexpectedly, Five recoils, and he hisses at her as if he were a great overgrown housecat.

Allison simply shoves one of her gloves in his mouth, and slides down to take a closer look at the trap. What hunter would bother traveling this far out of the way? The game is plentiful in these woods, but it isn’t extraordinary. There are no golden deer or white boars to hunt, and all the bears and wolves and great cats have fled the mountainside, for fear of the larger, far more dangerous beasts that have made it their territory.

Five coughs out her glove, and the two of them leap nearly a foot in the air when a yowling laugh comes flying over a nearby gorge, and one of the shadows reshapes itself as Diego. 

“Oh, Five?”

“Yes?” Five snarls through gritted fangs.

“A little caught up in something, are we?”

Five snorts irritably, and Allison rolls her eyes. 

“Will you help, or not?” she retorts.

Diego comes crashing down to join them, and as he takes a look at the trap, and claws at it with his immense talons, Allison gets a closer look at Five’s strange, grotesque face. 

_ It’s uncanny, _ she thinks with wonder: not only is it a peculiar mix of human and animal features, but unlike his brothers’, his face is  _ changing _ as well. One moment, he is an old man with whiskers and deep wrinkles carved into his face, the next, a pompous boy, the one after that, a handsome man no older than her. What strikes her as so odd is that she cannot  _ see  _ the change head on, yet whenever she turns her head away from him, she can sense his face rippling and blurring as it takes its next form.

It makes her eyes sting, to try and catch a glimpse of, so she gives up on trying to catch the change; magic, it seems, is sneaker than she’ll ever be. 

“You should be grateful,” says Diego, “That the two of us came along, you know.”

Allison frowns, recalling Grace’s words some time earlier. “Your mother told me that you could not die.”

Diego snorts, shrugging his sleek shoulders as he takes the branch Allison had been prepared to bludgeon Five with into his strange, hand-like paws, and begins poking at the trap. 

“We cannot, but we can be hurt,” Five grimaces, watching the metal peel out of his leg as Diego pries the trap open, and she hurriedly helps him drag his wounded leg out of its mouth. _ “Inconvenienced, _ if you will. You recall Ben’s stomach?”

“I cannot forget it.” She winces at the memory of those strange purplish tendrils. One had tried to touch her, and in an impressive display of will on her part, she was able to fight off the urge to stomp on it. 

“Some years ago, he’d gotten in a fight with a bear, and was slit open across the belly. He did not die, as he  _ cannot  _ die; rather, his organs simply… well, you  _ saw  _ them by now.”

“They adapted.”

Five chuffs, sniffing his wound critically. “They did.” 

Allison reaches down and tears roughly at her the skirt of her underdress. The fabric is worn now, after over a month of constant wear, and it is now stained gray-brown by weeks of dirt. But she has nothing else, and it does just well enough as a sloppy, makeshift bandage, despite her sloppy dressing. 

It takes several tries for the three of them to return to their feet; Five is struggling on three legs, Diego is the opposite of feline grace, and Allison keeps sliding in the slick mud. By the time she finally takes her first unsteady steps back onto solid ground, her skirt is brown and soaked through, with rotting leaves clinging to it. 

The Allison she had been months ago would have shrieked in disgust, in anger at such a fine dress being desecrated. This Allison sighs in annoyance, blows her hair out of her face, and presses on. 

A part of her wonders if she should turn and keep walking, if it’s worth abandoning her mad dash to the road so quickly. Then she hears Five try to hide a whimper in a hiss as he starts walking, and she balls up the urge and throws it as far away as she can.

Five limps ahead of them, determined to pretend as though he is not inconvenienced at all, that he had wanted to draw them out here just to take their attention.

Allison and Diego follow, their gait casual, as though they were out for a stroll together in the spitting rain. 

“Do hunters often trap here?”

“Every once in a blue moon, someone comes along. This seems to be one of those moons.”

“These traps have been here for  _ years, _ Five,” Diego snarls.

“And? Time bleeds together, out here. What does it matter, if it’s years or months?”

“How old  _ are  _ you?” she asks curiously.

Ahead, she sees the flicker of Five’s face as it warps.

“I have no idea,” he finally says. 

“And you’re not concerned about this hunter?” Allison frowns.

“Why would we be? We’ve sprung this trap, and soon enough we’ll spring the rest. He’ll tire of catching nothing and leave, or grow old and die. Frankly, I doubt we’ll ever meet him. We hardly see any of them, you know. We just see their trails and their traps, and they’ve never found the palace yet.” 

“Have you ever fought one?”

“One man,” Five hisses, “About a year ago. He doused me with something awful that made my eyes weep. In return, I took one of his.”

“You took his eye?”

“Reached up and plucked it right out.” He makes an obscene popping sound with his pointed tongue, and she smirks at his vicious sense of humor. 

“Could this be the same man?”

“Well, if he is, I’ll give him credit: he’s got some nerve, staying here after that. And he’s made more of an impression than any other.”

“Sounds to me as though you think of this as a game.”

“It is, in a way. These hunters pass through so rarely, I can’t help but welcome the challenge. I imagine that they have no clue who we are. People must have all but forgotten us now.” Five thrashes his whiplike tail. “It’s been a long,  _ long  _ time, after all.”

“Why, they haven’t forgotten you at all. There’s a story about you.”

“Oh? Care to tell it?”

Allison recounts what she remembers the villagers telling her so long ago: That the palace had once been bright and full of life, that the lord died, and his sons walled themselves up within his palace, summoning monsters to guard it all.

Then, she remembers the half-buried ruin, and the huddle of skeletons. And the beast she now realizes had been Five, stalking her and Vanya through it.

“Clearly,” she says, “They are mistaken.”

She is walking with murderers, with vicious killers, and somehow, she is completely unafraid. What on earth is  _ she _ then?

“Not about all of it,” says Diego. “The parties were real, and the lights, and what we did, and our father. But we’re free of him now--”

Five laughs, meanly. “We’re still  _ here, _ aren’t we? We’re living in his waste. We’re  _ leashed  _ to it. He designed his enchantment with that very purpose.”

“He?”

“What, did Mother not tell you? It was our father who did this.”

“No.” The cold has finally seeped into Allison, and she is shaking, “She did not.”

“Well. He did. He tied us all here, so we might never forget him, and he disfigured us all, so that thing that breaks all curses, love, might never come to pass.”

“Is there no way to restore your forms, then?” Allison wonders. Her mind leaps ahead of her, and she imagines that concealed somewhere in the crumbling palace, in some room she’s neglected, is some magic word, some potion brewed that might restore them to the men whose shredded portraits she’d seen. 

She does not imagine leading them out of the gates, and taking them down to Vanya’s village, or into the city. For some odd reason, something in her seethes at the thought that she might have to share them. 

“No,” Five says grimly, “These are our bodies now. We’ve grown into them, and cannot be parted from them.” 

“Then it’s hopeless?” 

Five pauses in his tracks, allowing Allison to pass him. She can sense his gaze, burning into her back, but she does not look back to challenge him.

“Don’t tell Luther,” Diego scoffs, “He’s been playing dress-up for years. And for  _ what?” _

They have returned to the palace, and she can see flickers of movement within the ruined windows. The rest of their brothers have gathered, and they have the scent of blood.

At once, Allison remembers her transgression, and feels the back of her neck burn hot at her insolence. She’d run out with her tail between her legs, had made a  _ fool  _ of herself. She wonders if he even noticed that she’d left, if he’d even been chasing her at all, or if she’d simply imagined it. 

If he had been angry, she sees no sign. He’s on all fours, and the cloak hangs loosely from his shoulders, dragging on the ground behind him. His hood is down, and his twisted face is heavy with worry.

He and the rest of his pack swarm around Five, who seems suitably disgusted by their attentions, as they sniff him and suspiciously eye the terrible bandage Allison had made for him.

She slips past them, feeling as though she is trespassing on some sacred, private moment between them, and skids past, tracking a heavy trail of mud into the parlor, further destroying its ebony-and-ivory floors. 

Luther keeps looking at her, as if she’s the unbelievable creature, as if he can’t believe she came back.

Someone has lit a fire in the hearth-- clumsily, given the scattering of leaves, shredded paper and twigs around it-- Allison drops to her sodden knees before it, eager to take in its warmth. Her mother’s pearls scratch at her neck, but she ignores the discomfort. 

Allison wrings out her hair, peeling it away from where it’s been pasted to her face, and sees Grace, sitting silently on a collapsed sofa at the far end of the parlor. Some of her sons had probably carried her down all those stairs to sit with them, and Allison wonders who it might have been.

Grace greets her coolly, as expressionless as she has always been, with arms that move as though they’re being manipulated by the invisible strings of a puppeteer. Grace is sewing something with her needle-fingertips, Allison sees, and she doesn’t feel the need to ask her what it is. 

This is the first time that all of them have been in one room, Allison realizes. The seven of them are always off in their own corners of the palace, and it seems it took nothing short of bloodshed to bring them together.

She leans against the wall, feeling the heat of the fire lick at her limbs, watching her strange companions in the dull orange light: Klaus and Diego, wrestling in a whirl of fur and scales; Five washing his strange, ageless face with his paws, like a cat would; Ben, with a permanently saddened pull to his mouth and a pearly glimmer to his fur, gnawing at a doe that must have been dragged in while she had been away. He tosses her a glob, and she chews it ravenously, caring not at all that there is blood running down her chin and gathering beneath her nails.

And Luther, padding up slowly and sitting by her side, not as a person would, but as a bear might, resting his long body before the fire. 

He greets her with a quiet, awkward nod, and she can feel the tension between them prickling like thorns. Her mistake has not been forgotten. And now, she must address it.

“You don’t look anything like your portrait,” Allison says softly, watching his haunches begin to raise, beneath their bedraggled covering. 

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

Allison stares into the eye-scouring brightness of the fire, letting it dance in strange shapes across her eyelids, when she closes them. She starts picking at stray leaves and sticks and clumps of paper, dropping them in to make little showers of sparks, and gazes long and hard at the painted eyes of the man who had the world at his feet, as they turn to cinders. 

She turns her back on the fire, and looks to his brothers, bumping her shoulder gently against his. “It’s not bad. It’s not bad at all.”


	10. Chapter 10

The days blend together, then, and she loses track of all of time, waking up to suddenly find herself in the depths of winter. The passage of time itself, it seems, has been buried under a thick blanket of snow, and she does not think at all about the outside world anymore; she may as well be on the moon. 

An invisible bridge between them had been crossed the day Allison had returned, and now, in the place of the uncertain tension that hung between them all, there is something that Allison supposes might be friendship; she has never had friends before, not truly, so she is not sure if this is what it is like.

Whatever it is, she is content to let it live among them without question. She will spend the rest of her days among them, and so she must make a home with them.

She guides Grace up and down the stairs at her request, and dusts her gently, and brings her her samplers and what’s left of her thread. 

Ben curls up beside her to snip critically at his brothers, a pastime that she finds she is quite good at. 

Klaus seems desperate as she is for someone new to speak to, and they delight each other with tales of the parties they’ve been to, and then with talk of anything at all. 

And most often, she goes to Luther. For as much time as she spends with all the others combined, she spends far more by his side. It is unconscious, as if she is a planet caught in his orbit, or perhaps it is the other way around.

Regardless, they are always together. 

He shares her love of music, she has found, and in the mornings, he listens with rapt attention to her song, delighting in the way that time unfreezes at its sound, liquifying and warming around them, before vanishing into the halls of the palace, to wander like tendrils of mist. 

In the evenings, the two of them sit together and watch the sky bleed red, then gold, then purple, then indigo. Once, Allison goes digging through a wine cellar-- mostly empty, which according to Ben is Klaus’s doing-- and produces a bottle of centuries-old wine for them to enjoy as they watch the sunset, thinking he might be charmed by her showiness. Upon taking a single sip of the wine, which they find has turned to mush with the ages, the two of them agree is simply the most disgusting thing they’ve ever had, and agree to never speak of it again.

When the snows are deep, so Luther tells her, the brothers put aside their daylight grudges to sleep in comfort in a great pile; she keeps her own bed, now piled high with pelts of deer and elk and bear, but she takes great enjoyment in watching the brothers jostle over who sleeps where in their nest in the parlor. 

She hunts with Five and Diego, following them into the woods to watch them track down game. Initially, they let her follow them as they track, but leave her be to do the chasing themselves. To make herself feel useful, Allison begins springing the traps they pass, and notes that they keep appearing every month or so, as if the cycle of the moon grew them from the freezing earth. 

However, the waiting hours run long, and they do not always return with something for her to carve open. So, on one day, when they are searching near the crumbling remains of the village at the far edge of their territory, Allison decides to commandeer one of their parties and demand that she be given a chance to participate.

At first, they humor her, trailing her like a pair of loyal dogs as she picks her way through the broken brick, Diego asking “Have you ever killed something before?”

_ My marriage, _ she thinks morosely.

“Mice,” she answers honestly. “Whenever there’d be one in the kitchen, I would hunt them down and beat them until they’d died. My sister hated it; she always cried. She wanted to let them outside.” 

Five tilts his head curiously at the admission that she has a sister. 

“You’ve met her, you know,” Allison says. “That night I came to stay here.”

He blinks slowly, and there’s a rumble of agreement in his chest. 

“Do you miss her?”

“Well,” Allison thinks, “I do not know. I think of her often, and I am sad whenever I do. But I’m not sure if I  _ can  _ miss her; we hadn’t been close in many years. Perhaps I miss the friendship I once had with her, which I will never have again.” 

“Not necessarily,” Five tells her, but she is no longer listening.

They have reached the church, and Allison kneels to peer at the dozens of disintegrating skeletons, tangled together in a mess of bones.

“Vanya and I passed through this village on our way here,” Allison tells them, and then recounts the story they’d come up with, about passing thieves razing it to the ground. 

There is a weighted silence that hangs in the air between her companions, thick as the snow-heavy clouds closing in overhead.

And slowly, as slowly as the winter sun rolls over the peak of the mountain, it dawns on Allison: there had been no marauders; it had been  _ them. _

It doesn’t surprise her. It feels almost inevitable, this realization, like the tide coming in. Of course it had been them.

They return in silence, their shadows stalking after them, two beastly brothers who’d murdered an entire village, and Allison, who does not feel anything within her shift upon learning this, and is therefore just as much a monster. 

She asks Luther about it, once they’ve returned.

He is waiting for her on the front steps of the palace, which, she learns, is quite an achievement. Allison has learned that he has not been outside the palace itself in many years, that there had been a time when he was able to make it as far as the rusted gate, then that range had shrunk to the edge of the overgrown gardens, before he had been bound-- not by magic, but by his own mind-- to the palace itself. 

He’s getting better, she knows.

Aside from daring to slip outside the palace walls, Luther is now no longer afraid to let her see him. His cloak had long ago joined the pile of fabric, fur and feathers that had made up the pack’s nest. His body is still stooped over, but no longer curled in a grotesque hunch, and for the first time, Allison understands that he is not sharp like Diego, nor sinuous like Five, nor quiet like Ben or languid like Klaus. He is  _ enormous _ , with a powerful sort of strength, like that of a bear or a silverback. Allison keeps catching herself thinking, morbidly so, about what it would be like for Luther to take her into his great paws and crack her spine in two. 

This thought plagues her often, especially at night, and she thinks it now, impulsively tangling her hands in his mane, and winding the fur around her fingers. They are in the ruins of what had once been the palace’s greenhouse, illuminated by the golden dome of the sunset sky. The two of them are pouring over a plan they are outlining to make the outer terraces of the garden usable for planting in the spring. He is talking about root vegetables, and she is staring at the streaks of gold in his winter coat, her mouth dry and her mind somewhere beyond the moon.

He shifts his sinewed arm as he gestures to a stack of pots, and reveals, inadvertently, a circular brand. Allison has noticed it some time ago, has seen it on each of his brothers, and adorning practically every surface in the palace. It is their father’s crest, and judging by the deep gouges in it, he has been clawing at it.

Allison thinks back to that scorched shell in the woods, half-buried in the snow. To the desecrated portrait of his father. To his brothers’ hissed words about the man.

“That village,” she says quietly, and watches his ears swivel in rapt attention, “Down the mountainside. The ruined one. That was you.”

Luther rolls his malformed shoulders forward. “Yes.”

Allison knows better than to ask why. There is no reason to raze a village to the ground, not to someone who lives in a palace such as this, not to a man whose father brands his children in life, and curses them in death. 

“Do you hate us?”

“No,” Allison says, without a hint of hesitation. She has thought long and hard about this on the cold walk back, and is at peace with her conclusion. “I ruined people too. I wasted years of my husband’s life, I eroded at my sister until she was a shell of herself, I made a child for no reason at all. I am a killer of hopes and dreams and love. I cannot hate you, for in all ways that matter, I am the same as you. In fact, I may be worse.”

“You could  _ never  _ be worse than us.”

“No one told me to do those things; I did them of my own volition, because I wanted to. I get the sense--” Allison reaches down to his forearm, taking it into her small hands and gently tracing the puckered flesh around the brand with a gentle fingertip, “-- that you had no such choice.” 

“I think…” Luther pauses, and she can hear the words gathering in his chest. He is bracing himself for them. “We could have chosen to disobey him, if we really wanted to. I think that we deserve what we’ve become.” 

“And  _ I  _ think…” Allison tugs his arm up, and he abides. She leans down, placing a soft, deliberate kiss on the scarred flesh, “That it doesn’t matter anymore. Years have passed, and time changes everything. Your body may be stagnant, but your mind has grown, and your heart has changed. Don’t bind yourself to the past.” 

He remains silent, and Allison leans down to nuzzle her cheek against the top of his broad head, before leaving him be. 

That night, wrapped in her blankets, Allison dreams. She is walking the halls of the palace, and the floors are so rotten that they’ve turned to pulp. Her bare feet sink deeper with every step, and her bones feel as though they’ve been replaced with lead. 

At the end of the hall, her voice comes echoing back to her; it is the song she’d sung that first time months ago, a millennium ago, and it sounds volatile and alive, like an evil spirit. It has been wandering the halls of the palace for months, and at last has returned to her, sapped of all its warmth, cold and childishly mean. It pounds and pulses, makes the walls shake and the long-glassless windows shudder, and drums up a fear in her that her ears might start bleeding. Her stomach is sick and knotted, twisting in her like a worm, or one of the things creeping about in Ben’s gut. 

She wakes shivering, every part of her numb, with a thick cloud of vapor hissing from her mouth. She is freezing, shaking like a leaf in the wind, and she wraps herself tightly in her blankets, dragging them behind her like the mantle of a wraith, as she pads down to where her beasts are sleeping.

There is no more division between the six of them. When she comes to crawl into their nest, they yield to her without question, rolling apart to provide her a space beside Luther. It seems to be understood that they belong together.

She is quite comfortable, nestled up among them; the pack is piled together like a litter of puppies, and she is snug, yet somehow not smothered at all. 

She leans over, after a moment, and rests her cheek against Luther’s leathery shoulder, radiating heat. Allison looks up, at a hole in the roof, where a lone star peers down at her, and watches it for a while, listening to the rumbling from five different ribcages around her. 


	11. Chapter 11

The mountains shed the winter season slowly. The blizzards stutter, then weaken, then cease entirely, and the snowdrifts diminish from being deep enough for Allison to bury herself up to her chest, to her waist, then to her knees. The game begins to trickle in from the lower valleys, and with them the vicious barbed traps that had nearly mutilated Five.

As the snows dwindle, the first storms of spring come, and with the wind at her heels, Allison’s sister returns, bent on rescuing her. 

Vanya arrives, pink-nosed despite the layers of dull clothing she’s cocooned herself in. She arrives with a pair of pack horses laden down with blankets and dried food and firewood. She arrives quietly, and is already across the threshold of the palace before anyone realizes she’s come. She arrives with Leonard. 

Allison is overcome with shock at the sight of her, nearly convinced she’s dreaming. She has never been close with her sister, has never felt such a surge of warmth at the sight of her, before now.

She throws the armful of firewood she’s been carrying, and leaps at Vanya, crushing her to her chest and sighing in delight at her presence. She takes her face between her hands, and dips down to lavish kisses on her forehead.

Vanya stares up at her, blinking quickly, looking to Allison as though she’s been grabbed by a complete stranger. Then, she settles, and smiles softly.

“I’m worried about you, you see?” Vanya says, when Allison demands an explanation from her, and she finally squeezes free of her sister’s grip. “I wanted to be sure you were alright.”

Allison smiles. So much has changed for her, that she finds it profoundly reassuring that her sister is the same as she’s ever been, hair dark and drifting around her face, still dowdy, still uncertain, still her Vanya.

“They’re safe, you know,” Vanya says, and Allison suddenly feels a pang at not thinking of her husband or her child. “I made sure of it. I brought them back, and I took them on the train back to the city, and settled them in.”

“Oh. That’s good.”

Vanya glances over her shoulder, where Leonard is hovering just beyond the threshold, staring around at the foyer in unveiled disappointment at its lack of splendor. Like the bloodsucker he is, he must be invited in, Allison presumes. She will not extend him that privilege. 

“I intended to come sooner,” Vanya says, still ever apologetic, ever wilted, “But…”

It’s as though his presence has stolen the rest of the words from her lips; she goes silent, tugging at her collar.

On her hand, Allison realizes, is a thin wedding band.

Months ago, she might have flown into a rage at the sight of it, might have cackled coldly at her sister’s silliness.

Now, she sighs, long and low and slow, and lowers her head towards Vanya’s husband, giving him the most vicious of glares. He’s kept Vanya from her, wolf that he is. 

All of his face is cast in shadow, save the unnaturally bright glint from his right eye. But he dips his head: he’s seen her. What’s more, Allison is adept at reading the shapes of shoulders now; she recognizes the twitching. He is impatient, reluctant to be here. He should be. 

“You’ve come for me?”

“Of course. Your family is safe now. I thought I’d return and save you.”

 _Oh, Vanya. Sweet, sweet Vanya._ She’s _always_ wanted to be a hero.

“How did you know I was not dead?”

“I didn’t. I had to find out.”

“And if I were?”

“I’d take your bones home, and bury them with our parents.”

“How lovely,” comes the sharp-edged growl that she knows to be Five’s, from somewhere in the mezzanine above the foyer in which they’re speaking. He’s perched on the banister, long whiplike tail swaying languidly back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.

Her pack has caught on, it seems; she can see their quick shapes flickering into place above them, gathered together in a mottled mess of shadow with a dozen reflective eyes flashing like tiny mirrors down at them. They begin conferring hurriedly among themselve, the rumble of their beastlike whispers rolling off the vaulted ceiling and down to Allison and her sister. 

Allison, who is used to their voices, feels not a twinge of surprise; the sound of their speaking is no stranger to her now than the lashing of rain against a window, or the crack of thunder over a distant mountainside.

Vanya, to Allison’s surprise, seems not entirely frightened of them. She’s quivering, but not from fear. _Is that excitement?_ she wonders, and something in her chest blossoms with pleasure; she is oddly invested in Vanya meeting her hosts, in knowing whether she likes them or not.

Then comes a sharp “Vanya!” from behind them: It’s Leonard, his voice perfectly nonoffensive, but still making Allison feel as though she’s been doused in slime.

Allison feels Vanya coil like a whip in her hands at her husband’s words.

“We need to go,” she says quietly, tugging at Allison’s tattered sleeves, “Right now. I’ve a horse for you, and we can ride--”

“Vanya,” Allison says, suddenly struck with a rush of protectiveness for her pack. _“No.”_

Above them, the guttural chattering ceases.

“What?”

“I can’t leave. I made a promise.”

“You…”

“I’m in no danger here, Vanya, and neither are you. These creatures have been good to me, and I am quite safe here.”

Vanya stares into her face curiously, repeating _“safe,”_ with an odd catch in her voice, the kind she’d have when she’d be puzzling through a particularly difficult problem when they were children.

Allison waits for her to finish thinking, and soon enough, Vanya withdraws her hands from Allison’s arms, and folds them coolly in front of her.

“Alright,” she says, “Then at least let me give you something to eat, some supplies; Leonard and I packed for the trip, you see, and we have so much. It wouldn’t feel right, leaving you here with nothing.”

“I’d love that. I’ll have the pack join us.”

Vanya dips her head a little, catching a small laugh before it leaves her. “Eating with monsters?”

“But of course! I am their guest, you see. And you are _my_ guests. It would be the height of impropriety to deny them a seat at our table.”

“Creatures that they are, I’d have thought they’d prefer to eat on the floor.” To Allison’s delight, Vanya raises her voice, throwing it up to their audience, “Would you prefer that? I could lay out a blanket.”

“Yes!” cries out the odd singsongy tone of Klaus. “Do you have wine?”

“Say no,” booms Ben.

“You don’t have to say ‘no,’” Allison hisses quickly into Vanya’s ear, conspiratorial as a schoolgirl. “Or ‘yes’ for that matter. They’re just joking around.”

“Oh, thank you.” Vanya smiles, “Is there anything else you might need? Are you hurt?”

“No, not at all.” Allison pauses, and a wry smile curls onto her face, “Well, actually, I don’t suppose you have that violin of yours with you.”

“I do, actually.”

“Really?”

Behind them, Leonard scoffs. It booms through the crumbling halls.

“I didn’t want to leave it behind,” Vanya says quietly, a little apologetic.

“Well then, you must play for us,” Allison demands. Above her, a high apelike whooping of approval sounds. 

Vanya agrees, and Allison guides her into the parlor, where she builds her fire, shows her where they’ll be gathered, and introduces her to Grace, who Vanya gapes at.

For the first time in a long while, Allison finds herself wanting a mirror, to fix herself up for dinner with her sister, so she sets to looking, trusting her sister to handle herself alone, and her pack to keep an eye on her husband, who is pacing uncomfortably in the foyer, casting weak smiles at each of the creatures as they lurch past him.

The search proves difficult, even for one who knows the palace as well as Allison has come to; her pack were thorough in destroying anything they might be able to see themselves in long ago. Eventually, she finds one, in a small wing off of a sitting room, with enough palm-sized shards to be able to see herself in.

Allison understands why Vanya had stared at her so strangely now: She is virtually unrecognizable now, but for the rope of grimy pearls still looped about her neck like a collar. Her cheeks have been hollowed out by the long winter, her skin scratched and rubbed through with dirt. Her hair is free of pins and cremes and she’d hacked most of it off some weeks ago; it now hovers about her head, thick and dark and free as a stormcloud. Her nails have grown long and sharpened, and her feet are blackened and tough. Gone is her fine wine-colored velvet dress; she is now wearing a mess of different rags and stripes of pelt stitched roughly together, and hadn’t thought of it at all. She looks like the kind of vagabond she’d have shrieked at and demanded to have dragged away from her only months ago. She looks wild, yet not at all unhinged, with the bright-eyed, unnerving confidence of a predatory cat. 

She looks happy.She _is_ happy.

And she understands why Vanya had been regarding her so strangely. She’d stepped out of the trappings of civilization, and into her own skin.

Allison stares at her face, smudged and all, and decides to leave it as it is, only licking the pad of her thumb and quickly sliding it along a particularly egregious splotch of soot along her eyebrow.

She returns to her sister to find her holding court among the beasts, eagerly unwrapping loaves of bread and wheels of cheese and showing them off. Left alone with them for perhaps fifteen minutes, she has already charmed them all, and Five, notorious for despising contact, has his head in her lap. How ironic, that here, among rot and decay, she is at her most vivacious.

Allison, who has survived on questionably-cooked meat, roots and berries for months, feels her stomach lurch in longing at the sight of the food she’s offering. She can only imagine how the brothers feel. 

Then she remembers: “Where’s Leonard?”

“He feels uncomfortable in the palace,” Vanya explains with a wilting shrug, “So he said he’d go riding in the forest for a while. He wants to water the horses.”

“Well, he could have used the fountain. The big one in front of the palace that doesn’t spout but is still filled with water? You rode right past it on the way in.”

“Oh. I guess he forgot.”

Five titters in an oddly childish way, like he’s delighted to find an excuse to dislike her husband, and Allison snorts, plopping down by Luther’s side to join them, and reach for the loaf.

“Your husband is an idiot,” she says, around a mouth full of food, “Why on earth did you choose him?”

Vanya’s eyes drop. “I was lonely. And he was there. And he was nice to me.” 

Beside her, Luther drops his shaggy head.

Allison immediately regrets asking, decides she will not discuss Leonard for the rest of her sister’s visit. 

Instead, she lets the brothers lead the conversation, listening to them chatter with Vanya about city life, about music and the ride in from town. 

The afternoon drags on lazily, and once the food’s eaten, the party finds itself strolling out to the garden, eager to show Vanya the grounds. She fits in with the pack eerily well, for one who’s only known them for a few hours, and Allison is swelling with pride that both her families are blending seamlessly. She’s never heard Vanya speak this much in one sitting, yet she’s chatting like a songbird with Five and Ben, never seen her move with a skip in her step, yet she’s climbing over crumbling walls and picking her way through brambles with ease, never heard her laugh this much, yet it’s ringing like a bell. It’s like the winds that brought her here have breathed life into her at last. She’s even pulling out her violin from its case, strapped to her back, and Allison realizes for a start that she is going to play before the eyes of strangers.

There’s a gentle pressure at her side, and Allison recognizes it implicitly to be Luther. She turns to him, and leans down to hear him speak.

He apologizes profusely for wanting to draw her away, but casts a suspicious greenish eye out towards the dark, snowstained forest. Towards the overgrown fountain, where Vanya’s horses have been lashed. Where her husband is nowhere to be seen.

She understands immediately: he wants to search for Leonard.

Allison agrees with his suspicion, then feels her heart pluck in guilt; she looks to Vanya, and catches her watching, worrying her lip and quickly averting her gaze when it meets Allison’s.

And she understands: She wants to play, just not in front of _her._

Months ago, Allison would’ve snapped at her. Now, she nods quietly, and is on her way, following Luther as he lopes off further down the path.

When Allison rounds the corner of a thorny hedge, she catches a glimpse of Vanya as she begins to play, sweeping her hair over her shoulder, assuming the proper stance, and drawing her bow over the strings.

She plays a few songs Allison recognizes, and a few she doesn’t, and before long, she’s accepting requests. The music flies freely through the air, and the wind catches it, carrying it across the grounds and wrapping Allison in it. The cavernous sound of it, far too big for someone as small as her, no longer scares her. If anything, she finds it oddly exhilarating, as if the shiver of violin notes in the air will suddenly make diamonds rain from the sky, as if it will open its jaws wide and devour her whole.

Allison pauses, listens to it grow, and feels the familiar itch of her voice, plucking at her, longing to swell up and draw the eyes and ears and hearts of all who were listening to her sister back towards her, so she might bask in the light of their attentions…

She swallows it, and turns to Luther.

“He’s nowhere, it seems.” She is speaking of Leonard, who is absent from the grounds; they’ve made a full circle now, and are back in the overgrown thorny garden they and Vanya had first climbed through. “He can’t be in the woods; why would he leave all the horses.”

“Inside, then.” Luther tosses his mane. It’s fuller now, no longer patchy and limp, having grown in thick over the winter. “Trying to steal something, you think?”

“Is there anything _to_ steal?”

"Everyone seems to think so."

"So there isn't?"

“Well, there're the cobwebs. Splinters. Shards of glass. Our mother.”

“Oh,” Allison grins, leaning an elbow on his bearish shoulder and planting her chin in her hand playfully, “And here I thought you’d have gilded halls and velvet beds and ropes of jewels. I feel a little cheated.”

Luther doesn’t pick up the playful jab, doesn’t return it with his own. His feline ears are turned to the direction of Vanya’s music, and his twisted brow is even more furrowed.

“Are…” He goes quiet for a moment, and she watches his jaw work. “Are you leaving with her, then?”

Allison blinks, clasping her palms together. She hasn’t thought of the world beyond the dense, dark forested mountainside for so long. It feels like a half-remembered dream now, and his question may as well have been an inquiry as to whether she’d like to travel to the moon.

“You would allow me to go?” She chooses her words carefully. She hasn’t been a prisoner here, not truly, since the moment her sister left. She’d chosen to stay of her own volition after all.

“It wouldn’t be fair of me,” Luther says, staring at the distant pale form of Allison’s sister, at how fearlessly she plays for the quick dark shapes circling her, “To deny you your home.”

Oh, what would that be _like,_ to ride down to the village, to climb onto a train, to be rattled back to the city and put up in her mansion, with its polished floors and dozens of rooms with immaculate possessions that she hasn’t used once? 

_Home is the wrong word for it,_ she’s realizing. 

“You know, you might be happier there. You’ll be warm, and you’ll be among people, and you’ll have a comfortable life, a _beautiful_ life. We can’t… _I_ can’t give you that here.”

She hears the meaning between his words: He cannot give her anything, not truly. He isn’t like the animal bridegrooms of old tales, who can be cured by a kiss or a marriage vow. He is the prince of nothing, whose territory is a deserted valley and subjects are four beasts, an automaton and a scattering of stray animals. 

He’s wrong, she knows. 

“Oh, that’s not true,” she says, listening to the distant silvery glistening of her sister’s music as it swirls through the air, across the gardens and to the two of them. She turns, so she is facing him, extending a scarred hand and dipping playfully. “You can give me a dance.” 

He turns his head up to stare at her, a little dopishly, but she can see something bright sparking in his eyes. Whatever it is, her chest flutters at the sight of it, and she’s never felt warmer in her life.

There’s a quick, surreptitious glance off to where they’d come, but the shapes of their siblings are distant and utterly distracted. 

Luther lifts himself to his hind legs, balancing exceptionally well, and Allison’s breath catches at the sheer size of him; at his full height, he is perhaps two feet taller than her. His great, gnarled paw unfurls, and catches her hand between two of his claws in such a fine, gentle movement that she hardly feels him at all. 

“I’m not exactly sure how this is done,” he murmurs, shifting from one leg to the other, staring down at her bashfully.

“Oh, Allison says, taking a step forward to guide his arm into place against her lower back, and a pleasant chill runs down her spine when she feels his weight settle exactly where she wants it to go, bringing them so close that they’re leaning against each other, that his heat is seeping into her body through her rags, “I’ve done this a thousand times. I can teach you.”

“Is it complicated?”

Allison shakes her head, smiling sweetly up at him. “It doesn’t have to be. We can just stay like this.” 

And so they do, Allison and Luther, nestled comfortably against each other, gently swaying in the early evening breeze, wrapped in the music of a distant violin, of the bare trees creaking, the brambles rattling, the wind whistling playfully. Their spotlight is a molten sun as it dips below the peaks, their audience no one at all.

Somewhere in the midst of it all, in a lull of silence between songs, Allison finds herself resting her head against his massive chest, feeling the gouges of ancient, healed-over scars, hearing the pounding of his colossal heart drumming away. 

Compelled by a sort of magic that Allison has never felt before in her life, she looks up, up, up at him, almost shyly, and finds him staring down at her, his twisted face softer than she’s ever seen it.

They are at such a disadvantage in height that it is impossible to say who starts the kiss, only that he leaned down, lightly curling his claws around her waist, and she hopped up onto her toes, tilting her head back to allow him closer, bringing her hands up to drag her fingers through his mane.

It’s short, and simple, and sweet, and remarkably chaste. It’s enough to bring tears to her eyes.

Somehow, in breaking away, to stare up at him and see him looking at her in awe, she is seized by an intense, heart-deep pang of wanting. Of wanting him, of _never_ wanting to leave, of wanting to tell him that.

But he is already pulling away, dropping down to his paws. Dusk has fallen upon them like a purple velvet curtain, and, bound by the laws of magic that confine each of his brothers, Luther pulls away, beginning to walk somnambulantly, back towards the palace. In the far distance, she can see each of his brothers following suit, Vanya trailing after them uncertainly. Twice, Allison has witnessed this phenomenon, when she and the brothers had been hunting late into the day. It always chills her, seeing their wills melt away like wax.

She walks beside him for a moment, still mulling over what has just transpired between the two of them. They are now the last two outside, and she is excited by the prospect of being alone with Luther again.

Then comes the cry tearing from the depths of the ruin, high, anguished, profoundly inhuman. Allison knows her pack well enough to distinguish whose it is; something terrible has happened to Diego.

They’re off before it goes quiet, Luther bounding on all fours far ahead of her, tearing into the walls and sliding heavily across the floors. 

Finally, Allison rounds a corner, skidding on the destroyed tile, and stops dead in her tracks. 

They’ve made it to the foyer now, and the rest of her pack are gathered around the grand staircase. Allison isn’t even in the room before she sees what’s happened: Grace is lying at the foot of the stairs, china chunks of her head and arms and torso scattered across the filthy floor. She’s fallen, and is in pieces.

Allison freezes, clapping her hands over her mouth in horror, feeling a wave of numbness wash over her as she watches Luther barking orders at his brothers, Five staring in abject shock, Klaus and Ben scurrying every which way, Diego shivering above his mother’s shattered body.

Sensation returns at last when something begins to prickle at the edge of her senses, and she turns, slowly.

It’s Vanya and Leonard, back at last, slipping through the entryway. Vanya’s staring back over her shoulder in bewildered horror, and her husband’s hand has her wrist in a white-knuckled, bruising grip. He’s hunched over her, whispering something inaudible in her ear. 

In that moment, in a shaft of perfect moonlight, his face is illuminated, right eye sparking unnaturally bright and Allison suddenly understands why: it is made of glass.

Allison freezes, remembering the traps, remembering Five’s words all those months ago, about hunters, about the man he’d maimed.

It isn’t until they’ve reached the horses that Allison realizes she is staring at that very man.

And once he’s fully saddled, once he looks back to the palace and sees her, truly sees her, staring up at him, she realizes that very man is glaring back at her.

His face changes, blanching into an expression of pure fright. He knows that she knows, and Allison takes a ferocious step out of the house towards him. She has no weapons, no knives, no musket, but she’ll tear him limb from limb with her bare hands. _He has come for them, he has come for us,_ she thinks. _He is here to kill the beasts. Grace did not fall; she was pushed._

She’s only taken her first step onto the overgrown path when his horse turns on its heels, and goes racing for the treeline.

Allison, swelling with vicious, burning hate, gives chase, breaking out of the house, tearing after him across the clearing, through the ruined gates and into the black forest alone.


	12. Chapter 12

Allison sprints further and further into the dark, feeding herself to the hungry maw of the shadowed forest fearlessly. She is alone; the brothers will not be joining her. They are bound to the palace after nightfall, are probably pacing inside its walls, realizing who must be responsible for their mother’s fall, and helpless to stop him from leaving without punishment.

Allison is not.

She is not bound by the cruel laws of a curse as they are; she can leave as she pleases, and she does so now. Grace may well be dead, and if that is so, she must be avenged. If not, then the man who’d harmed her, who’d laid the traps sprinkled throughout their territory, who’d abandoned Vanya so thoughtlessly, must be destroyed.

Hot blood is roaring in her ears and she can feel her heart, fully grown and revived at last, and now beating furiously at the inside of her ribcage, yet somehow, Allison is perfectly calm.

An absolute air of serenity has overtaken her; she is not tired, despite her lungs heaving. She is not cold, despite her breath bursting before her in thick puffs. Her hair is whipping like a lion’s mane about her head, yet it never falls in her face once. She is not afraid, even though the branches are lashing at her face and she is alone, weaponless, in the wilds, pursuing a monster of a man.

She is moving fast and light, nearly flying over the drifts, fueled by her fury, and the single, savage desire to see this man dead.

She can’t see him in the trees ahead; she can see hardly anything at all. The moon is bright and full, painting the highest branches of the trees an eerie white, and their trunks inky black. They cast sharp silvery shadows across the forest floor, mottling the snow with gray witch’s claws, but Allison can find the tracks Leonard’s horse has left behind easily. He’s somewhere in front of her, dragging through the shallow, half-melted snowdrifts. 

_ He cannot live, _ she thinks,  _ He knows where we are. He knows who is here, he knows how to get here, and how to hunt here. He will come back again and again and again, as he has before, and he will not stop until every last one of them is dead. Or perhaps he wants something far worse than death for them.  _

She has little time to think about his motives; it could be any number of things. He may be after the contents of the palace itself, misguided and convinced it is filled with long-abandoned treasure. He may be after the brothers, for some twisted reason.

Some small, selfish part of her wonders if he might in fact be here for her. That with her dead, what’s left of her family fortune transfers to her sister. And, if that were true, then her sister would be next, as the only thing standing between him and their inheritance.

Allison shakes loose of the thought. 

It doesn’t matter. He’s hurting her family, and for that he must be destroyed.

Ahead of her, a flash of movement, a shadow just a bit darker than the rest. His horse, lashed to a fallen branch, sniffing anxiously at the air and nickering.

He is somewhere close, then, trudging about the snow on foot, making no effort to hide his tracks.

_ Idiot, _ she thinks savagely, feeling a rush of vicious confidence.

His prints are deep and dragging; he doesn’t understand how to navigate the snow, not like she does, so she finds him quickly, off one of the brothers’ favored hunting trails, the one they use because of the flat slope up to the grounds that makes dragging kills back easier.

Leonard is crouched over, rifling curiously through the contents of a bag. He is assembling another trap; she can see the sharp steel teeth being cranked open, she can imagine a paw or hand or foot being torn apart. There’s a silver strand of tripwire drawn tautly between the trees just ahead- no doubt to set that trap off on whoever walks by. 

Allison drops immediately, hackles raised, and slips in closer, stepping light enough to avoid sinking into the snow entirely. She reaches up, to her mother’s fine strand of pearls, and slowly unloops it from around her neck, winding it around her fists and pulling it taut into a garrote.

For a moment, he tenses, and she freezes, catching her breath in her lungs and holding it.

Then, he pricks up his head, and slowly begins to turn.

Allison leaps across the distance between them, dragging her pearls about his neck, pulling sharply back, tighter, tighter,  _ tighter. _

He’s taller than her, rising to his full height, dragging her forward onto her toes, but she clings to him, twisting and shrieking so loud the branches above them rattle like bones. Leonard starts to buckle under her weight, and she can hear a popping, ragged gagging somewhere in his chest. She squeezes harder, but--

\--There’s a cry from behind them, her sister’s, and Allison blinks.

It’s a mistake, to lose focus for even a second. The pearls slip from her palms, slick with sweat, and she’s being wrenched over Leonard’s shoulders, borne down hard face-first onto the ground, feeling the digging of tiny stones and twigs pressing into her palms and knees and chest.

And a thin, freezing slice at her neck.

Time freezes, as it often does in moments of abject horror. Allison feels a cold bolt of fear race down her spine, realizing what’s just happened, what she has just landed on, what is about to happen.

And then the spell is broken, and blood begins to pour loose from her neck, soaking her front.

Allison clamps her hands to her throat, rolling over onto her back, desperate to lay flat and still against the ground, to stop as much of her own blood from gushing out as she possibly can, driven by an animal urge to survive, despite a tiny voice ringing like a worrisome bell in her head telling her  _ it won’t matter, he’s right there, he’ll kill you, he’ll kill you and use your body as bait and... _

He is above her now, a wraith against the night, the moon behind him.

He is staring down at her, and he is smiling, his one live eye meeting hers and glowing with glee.

Allison has enough strength to bare her teeth in a silent, red-stained snarl. He won’t see her cry or whimper or plead. Morning will come, and he’ll have a horde of monsters after him.

A dark, glittering cloud begins descending on the edge of her vision, like a swarm of tiny beetles skittering across the sky, and her cunning begin to sink into the back of her mind as if it were quicksand, giving rise to strange thoughts, like the uncanny sensation of the moonlight, shining through her.

Then a distant roaring rumble, as if an avalanche had started somewhere up the mountain. Leonard seems to hear this one too, glancing up in surprise and befuddlement, but she blinks, long and slow, and stops being able to make him out at all. 

Then Vanya, her tiny, timid Vanya, driving a hunting knife into her husband as easily as though he were made of rotting meat, of Vanya,  _ her  _ Vanya, tearing into his neck savagely with her teeth, of arterial spray splashing out about the snow and down onto her face.  _ Is it hers, or his, _ she wonders, and then whether it matters.

Then being lifted, being dangled feet above the snow, with her hands still clasped firmly about her throat, watching the treetops skate past her vision in a whirl, clouds of deep gray dust swirling up around her.

Then a cacophony of anguished, furious, monstrous cries, and a thunderous boom of a kindly voice, saying  _ please, let her go, let her go, save her, take her home, take her away. _

Allison mouths:  _ No, I want to stay. I want to stay, please let me stay. _

Then, the sensation of falling from a great height, down, down, down, with the ground never greeting her. She is lost in a black, howling void, for a long, long time.


	13. Chapter 13

Allison awakens to the heavy metal rattling of the train beneath her, to the blur of the countryside flying past her in a dingy window to her left.

For a moment, she kicks wildly at the bed on which she lays, reaches up to grab at her neck, to hold the blood in.

But there are calloused, strong hands there to catch hers.

They are Vanya’s hands, she realizes, after a moment, and she settles.

There’s a weight about her throat, an itchy, clothlike one, and she recognizes it for a thick bandage, feeling the intangible fist clenched around her heart loosen in relief.

Vanya is talking to her, but her voice is coming from some high, faraway place, echoing around the inside of her skull:  _ don’t touch, please, the stitches are so new-- _

Allison sighs, her eyes so heavy in their sockets. She squeezes her sister’s hands, and tosses herself back into that darkness.

She wakes and sleeps irregularly for the remainder of the trip, sipping slowly from the glasses Vanya brings her, content to spend the rest of the ride in a doze.

When she next truly wakes, with the same sharp clarity she’d had when she’d first regained consciousness, she is in the city she’d left some months ago, and she is so wobbly that she must be half-carried down to the carriage that bears her back to her mansion. It feels that her body has betrayed her, weak as it is, and Allison bites her lip, unable to bear the passing glances of people who might know her.

The house is boarded up, all the windows dark and dusty.

Allison stares in wide-eyed silence, leaning against her sister, as the doors are opened and she is ushered into a dark, cavernous space devoid of all furniture.

Vanya is talking to her, and she is half-listening. The way her voice echoes off of the empty walls makes it difficult to ignore. 

“Patrick had sold everything,” she tells her, “And he’s to sell the house in a few weeks as well. I tried to stop him, but--”

Allison raises a hand dismissively. Her husband thought her dead for months, and he wanted to move away from a place that reminded him of her coldness. He has not done a kind thing, but a fair one. She cannot begrudge him.

“No,” Allison begins, then shudders at the grotesque noise that leaves her mouth. It is not a word at all, but a growl. She claps her hands over her mouth, as though she might stop it from escaping, but it is too late; her sister and their attendant have heard it, and the former sighs sadly. The latter winces, as if he'd been slapped.

Allison realizes now: Her life has been saved, but at the cost of her voice.

She strides to the only mirror left standing in the house, the one that her father had bolted into the wall to secure especially well, and starts at the crispness of her image, some small, superstitious part of her, responding to the childish fear that her reflection may well leap through the border and snatch her and drag her in, and she would not be strong enough to fight her off.

She sees herself now, thin and tired with deep, purplish bags beneath her eyes, and a wolfish glow in her pupils. She is clean, scrubbed down by the doctors that must have attended to her in her sleep, and in one of her sister’s ill-fitting, dull dresses.

She reaches up to her neck, to the bright strip of white cloth that Vanya has dutifully changed twice-daily, and unwraps it slowly, terrified for the first time in months.

The cloth comes undone, sticking a bit to the wound, which is pinkish and closing, and Allison winces as she pulls it away.

When she sees it, she does not cry. Does not scream, does not smash the mirror with her fist. Does nothing at all.

She simply stares at the hideous ropy scar drawn about her throat, and thinks,  _ I have traded one necklace for another. _

Strangely, she starts to laugh.

Or rather, she thinks she’s laughing, she  _ looks  _ like she does, but there is no sound but a soft breathy gasping coming from her.

Vanya’s hands are on her arms now, guiding her gently away from the mirror, taking her up to the window, which she opens with a grunt, so they might take the air and stick their legs out to watch the people pass.

There are no treats to share, no secrets to tell.

There is only them, sitting quietly shoulder-to-shoulder.

Here, with the city stretched before her, shining long after dark, Allison suddenly feels all the emotion she’d stoppered weeks ago hit her like a wave.

It pulls her under, and she begins to sob.

She wraps her arms tightly around herself, feeling her sister pull her close, and lets herself go.

Once she’s cried herself truly empty, once her eyes are sticky and heavy, and her chest is shuddering and her sleeves are soaked with snot, she finally finds the will to speak.

“Vanya?” The two of them wince at the sound of her voice, ripping loose from her and grinding like gravel.

“Yes?” Vanya does not look at her with disdain, only a deep sort of sadness.

“Why did you take me back?”

“Because I had to save you.”

“No. Why did you take me back  _ here.” _

Vanya starts, as though Allison had reached out and slapped her. 

“Because I… I thought you’d wanted…”

“I miss them. I miss him. I miss them all so much, I…” Allison trails off. There are simply no words to describe the numbness of it all. She had died out there in those woods, and her sister had revived her corpse, but not her soul. That is the closest she supposes she will get to the truth, and contents herself with it.

She goes quiet, drawing her knees up to her chin, staring out at the dull, starless sky. Allison glances down at her sister’s hands, blinks at realizing that her ring is gone.

“Is he dead?” Allison asks, then. 

Vanya flinches.

Then slowly, slightly, she nods.

“Good.”

They stay there until morning, watching the city sleep and wake like a pair of housecats, Vanya thinking about how horribly she’d transgressed, Allison about her life in this city, the stage she’d sung on, the family she’d made and neglected, the balls she’d dazzled at, the hundreds of people she’d charmed. People who, now that her voice is no longer golden and smooth, but gnarled and rattling like a glass jar full of teeth, shall want nothing to do with her.

She doesn’t belong here, not at all. Perhaps she did once, perhaps she’d been lying to herself for so long she’d started to believe it. It does not matter to her; only this does: the illusion is shed. Allison is a creature of the wild now, having torn off a piece of it and nestled it in with her living, beating heart for safe keeping, and that piece keens to return her to it.

And Vanya, dear, sweet Vanya who sees all and knows so much, can tell it just by a glance.

Allison sighs, long and low. 

And Vanya brings her face up, from where she’d been hiding it between her knees, and looks at her.

“If you like, I could buy us tickets back.”

Allison starts.

“You…”

“You were happier out there.” It’s not a question.

“But you have your--”

“I have nothing. No one here loves me. I haven’t been back to that village since I left it with him to come find you. No one there would miss me. All I need is my violin, and I have that.” Vanya worries her lip, “And you.”

Allison smiles, reaching over to tug Vanya to her side, and rest her head on her shoulder. “And me.”

So. They return.

They go in silence that morning, without ceremony, without announcement; there is no one to witness them, no one to care that they’ve gone.

They take the weeks of train travel in companionate silence, reading and speaking quietly to one another, gently taming Allison’s new perpetual growl so it might not make her throat ache whenever she bears it.

They ride out without speaking to anyone, two strange, ragged women with ghosts in their eyes that none dare to look at too long, for fear that those spirits will tear loose and possess them. And the women do not look back. This is the last time they will ever travel down to the village; there is no use in being sentimental, especially about strangers. 

They ride long and hard, deeper and deeper into the wood, deeper and deeper into the day, traveling lightly with only practical things; the only luxury they deemed necessary was Vanya’s violin, and Allison simply cannot wait to hear it. Now, spring has truly come, and the paths are shaded with the dappling of leaves, overgrown with the buds of flowers that shall soon bloom.

They pass the ruin of the ancient town, and Allison tells her frankly what had happened there a hundred or a thousand years ago, and Vanya listens in silence, nodding frankly. She has no reason to judge, not when she’d torn her husband’s throat out and left him to rot in a ditch.

No ferocious shapes greet them beyond the ruin, and Allison feels her heart catch in her throat. She keeps looking for Five or Diego or Klaus to prowl out to greet her, but there is nothing at all. 

Finally, dusk falls, and they come upon the gates, ruined and rotten and rusted, and pass them easily, rounding the corner of the path only for Allison to nearly fall off her horse in shock.

The palace begins and ends in the grand doorway, both enormous carved oaken doors hanging ajar, as if in greeting. Beyond them rises a nightmarish mountain of black, twisted wood and stone and glass. The grand palace of the house of Hargreeves had  crumbled completely in her absence, low and humbled and alone, and lays like a carcass in the woods, open to scavengers. Allison gapes, utterly dumbfounded.

“Oh my,” says Vanya coolly beside her, “It’d been falling apart when we’d left it, but I had no idea it’d turn to this.”

Allison leaps from her horse’s back, racing into the ruins. The dust and ash is ankle-deep, and she skids in it childishly, wheeling her arms about to keep her balance. Ahead of her the staircase where Grace had been pushed to shatter leads up and up into pure air, and Allison wrenches her head back to look up and up; the ceiling itself has collapsed, and all the floors above the ground above it. Now, the palace is a castle in a classical sense; four ruinous jagged walls open to the sky. Above them, the moon peers down upon them with her scarred face. 

It is ruined, utterly, and it has never felt freer.

“Allison,” calls Vanya, and she turns to regard her sister, pointing down at the floor.

For the first time, it occurs to her to look down.

She also realizes that she’d never once stepped in broken glass or splintered wood, because a path had been cleared for her; there are dozens of them, thick with pawprints, snaking off in every which way, clearings dug out with clawmarks plainly visible in the dust. 

_ They’re alive. They lived, all of them, and they are fine. They are off hunting somewhere, and will be back again soon enough. _

Allison cries out in relief, dropping to her knees, and sending up little eddies of dust.  Then, thinking for a moment, she realizes they have left the ruin at night, and the implication barrels into her like a harsh freezing wind, one she greets with a brilliant girlish smile. _They are free now. They are free. They are free, and yet they stay._

It isn't something she thinks, so much as feels: They are staying because they are waiting for her.

Her pack arrive a bit afterwards, when Vanya and Allison have cleared away the still-standing hearth and built a fire, slinking in with their long lupine shadows ahead of them, muzzles wet with blood. They are still twisted, frightening creatures, still the strange animals Allison had known. None has cast off his beastly skin and emerged a handsome bridegroom, and none will. The bounds of their curse were never based in their bodies; the forms they've been bound to are the ones they'll wear for the rest of their lives, now mortal. 

This is alright. Allison prefers them as they are, strange and vicious as she is. And  Vanya, though she may not understand this for quite some time, likes their current forms as well. 

The pack settle in around them, part reverent, part expectant, part surprised, and Allison is accepted among their ranks without question, pressed in on all sides by shaggy coats and quills and scales, the warm weight of five brothers relieved to find her alive and well after the state she'd left them in. Vanya hovers at the edge of their crowd, but by the end of the night, she is sure, Vanya will become one of them as well, and she is so very excited, at the prospect of a life out here, alone with her. She and her sister haven't been close in so long, and they have the rest of their lives to come to know each other deeply. 

There are questions volleyed at her quickly, and Vanya allows Allison to speak, to explain that they've come back, they've come to stay. When she does, when her rumbling growl leaves her throat, there is only a moment of surprise caught in the flicker of pointed ears and the widening of luminous eyes, before they settle. Her voice matches the rest of theirs perfectly; she will never flinch or tremble at the sight of someone reacting to her.

They observe her admission that the two of them shall stay with quiet acceptance; it seems natural to most of them, that she would return. Inevitable, even: the ruin of their palace is dark and shaded, and they will need a star to beat back the shadows. None is brighter than she. 

There is one who is shaken, deeply, by the news, one whose massive thrumming heart skips a beat at the realization that Allison, who had the whole world at her fingertips, and with time and work could have regained it, had chosen to toss it away, had chosen to return, had chosen them, had chosen _him._

The seven of them will have a very long time to get to know each other, to settle in and lick their wounds together, to wander off into the night and come and go from this place as they please, and Vanya starts tonight, gathering four of the pack and allowing them to lead her off across the grounds. The shards of Grace had been buried out at the edge of the garden, they say, and she wants to pay her respects.

Allison will too, but later. She has all of time in her hands now, and can do with it whatever she pleases, and it pleases her to be near the only brother who remains.

Luther guides her to the pack's new nest, and Allison settles in, making small adjustments to the way the bedding fits beneath her. When it is at last to her liking, she leans against his broad scarred shoulder, and feels him wrap around her gently, as though she were the most precious thing in the world, and he could not bear it if he were to break her. Silence settles over them like a downy blanket, and the moon smiles. 

_I love you,_ she wants to say, but she finds no need at all to do so. He knows, he _must_ know.

Tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after, she will hunt with his brothers, and dig out a space for herself and her sister among the rubble, and listen to Vanya play her music. She will laugh with Klaus, snap at Diego playfully, roll her eyes with Five, smile with Ben. She will talk to Luther, about what it is that's blossoming between them, about how she is ready for it, and willing, and so prepared to be loved. He will hold her gently in his great paws as she lies before him, smooth away all her jagged edges with the roughness of his tongue, and she will let him devour her. She will run her hands down his twisted back, and take comfort in the strangeness of its slopes, knowing them to be his and his alone. Allison has had a hundred lovers, and they've all blended, one into the next, but this one will stand high above them all; she will never touch him and wonder at who he is, she will always be certain that it is him.

Tonight, they are content to sit in each other's company in the ruin at the edge of the world, listening to the distant excitable cries of their family, to the cries of night birds and chorus of insects, to let the moon bathe them in a silvery blue shine that is warm and bright as they ruminate on what they shall become to one another, and how natural it feels, like the turning of a season. 

When the pack at last returns, and they all roll in to sleep in a messy heap, Allison will turn to regard everyone. Vanya, nestled against Five, who she's never seen smile quite like this before. Ben and Klaus and Diego kicking at each other in their sleep, tails twitching. Luther at her side, the only other member of their odd little family awake, and gazing quietly at her with a softness in his eyes that makes her heart skip a beat. 

They are together, and they are happy, and they will remain that way for a long, long time to come, and all is right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it ends. This has been a big departure from what I normally write, so I have a lot of mixed feelings about how it turned out, but I had a lot of fun playing with it. Plus, I'm a slut for this fairy tale and all its variations.
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> (+'je te laisserai des mots' by patrick watson)


End file.
